Harriet was stupefied. Then she found her voice.
"Shouldn't you be stroking a white cat as you say that?" she croaked.
The young man sighed. When he held out his hand, Ginny's wand slipped from beneath her body and floated over to him.
"I can tell you think you're very clever." He caught the wand out of the air, as naturally breathing. "At first, I thought you must have some intelligence, if only a little, but after having to deal with you for half an hour . . . It's truly a mystery to me how you managed to defeat the greatest wizard who ever lived."
"The what wizard?" Harriet felt her anger returning, bubbling beneath her skin. "If you mean Voldemort—"
"You dare speak his name?" the boy said in a soft voice. He was playing with Ginny's wand, pressing the tip against each of his fingertips. "Stupid Ginny Weasley said you did . . . more of your foolishness, I see. . ."
"Maybe you didn't hear," Harriet said, shaking with anger and pain, "living in a diary or wherever you were, but Voldemort's pathetic, he's nothing at all—I saw him last year, and he's nothing but a wreck, he can't even hold his head up because he hasn't got one—"
The boy's face contorted; Harriet shouted, "Expelliarmus!"
The boy's wand shot out of his hand and soared over Harriet's head. He blinked, and then unexpectedly he began to laugh. It was high and cold and made Harriet feel like she'd slipped off the edge of the walkway into the icy black water.
"Very good, Harriet," he said, so mockingly she wanted to throw her wand away and punch him in the face. "But . . . dear me, now what are you going to do? How many spells do you know, to finish your enemies?"
"Who the hell are you?" Harriet grit out, not wanting to admit he was right. She knew stupid kids' curses, to make you dance or laugh yourself sick, but she didn't know anything to hurt somebody the way she wanted to hurt this boy for what he'd done, to Ginny and to Colin and Penelope Clearwater and that girl who'd died all those years ago whose name she didn't even know.
"You really haven't figured it out, have you?" He looked totally unconcerned to have no wand, or to be on the wrong end of Harriet's.
"You say I'm stupid," she said, "but you're not too bright yourself. I asked, didn't I?"
He didn't like being called stupid. He reminded her a bit of Draco Malfoy—malicious, cold-hearted, suave until something didn't go his way.
Her eyes flicked toward Ginny and the diary—
The diary from 1941.
Fifty years ago, the Chamber of Secrets was opened . . .
"You're T. M. Riddle, aren't you?" she said slowly. "You opened the Chamber of Secrets fifty years ago."
"Obviously," he said, sounding both bored and faintly disgusted with her. "I am the one, the only, Heir of Slytherin. The blood of Salazar himself runs in my veins." He ran his fingers along his lapel, like it was one of his precious veins with the precious blood of loony fucking Salazar inside; and that time, when he smiled, it was just like he'd made Ginny smile in the shadowy dormitory. "I have always been able to feel his greatness within me."
"Greatness that made you go live in a diary?" She said it to annoy him, but he only laughed again, a mocking, disdainful laugh.
"Oh, yes. That's no ordinary diary, Harriet." He tapped his foot on the stone floor next to it. "It's a mark of my genius—not the first, but one of the most inspired. For a long time it was rather dull, I admit . . . decades spent waiting, biding my time . . . Imagine my surprise when, just a few months ago, someone started communicating with me." He said communicating like he meant something else.
"Ginny," Harriet said. Her face was so white and still . . .
"Yes," Riddle said. A sneer curled his lip, a hundred times uglier than any sneer of Snape's, even though this face was so handsome. "Stupid Ginny Weasley. No, I shouldn't mock her—she's the reason I stand before you, Harriet. She's the reason those Mudbloods are lying still as stone. She's the reason you've all been so terrified, so out of your wits, waiting for a monster you couldn't name . . . These last months have been so delightful, and all because stupid, whiny, trusting Ginny Weasley wrote in a diary she found . . . "
Harriet was shaking with anger, and Riddle could tell; it seemed to delight him. He laughed again, and she hated him like she had never hated anyone.
"The more she wrote to me, of her fears, her desires, her jealousies—she's very jealous of you, Harriet, did you know? Famous Harriet Potter, whom everyone talks about, who can buy as many new robes and spell-books and ice creams as she wishes, whom her brothers praise when they only tease their stupid little sister terribly—oh, she hates you, sometimes."
Harriet refused to believe him. Even if he was telling the truth, she had no business hearing what Ginny had written in a private diary. Ignoring the fact that she had been planning to read that diary herself, she let Riddle talk on. He seemed to like to hear himself talk. She would have used his monologue to form a plan, but all those thoughts slid through her grasp like they were coated in slime. What if hurting Riddle could still hurt Ginny?
Hurt Ginny . . . hurt . . . she wracked her brain, trying to figure out what it was about that thought that was piping up and saying, Yes, that, that. How the hell would hurting Ginny hurt—
Not-Ginny hadn't wanted to touch me. Like it would hurt her.
Could that have been because of Riddle, possessing her? If Harriet tried to touch him, would it hurt him?
"The more she wrote to me, the stronger I grew," Riddle was saying, now starting to pace up and down, along Ginny's motionless body. "I decided to return to that noble work I'd had to abandon fifty years ago. They were going to close down Hogwarts after that Mudblood died, and I couldn't let that happen. You understand, I'm sure. Stupid Ginny told me you have the most appalling Muggle relatives.
"Shall I tell you a secret, Harriet Potter?" Something glinted to life in his eyes and stayed there, something both bright and dark at the same time: a shade of red. "I had filthy Muggle relatives, too. Worthless wastes of flesh. I killed them, of course. It was immensely satisfying. You might think on it."
"I'm nothing like you," Harriet said, her voice shaking.
"No?" Riddle said, unconcerned. "We are both half-blood. Of course, my blood is by far more powerful . . . but you, too, have the rare gift of Parseltongue, so who is to say whether or not there isn't a drop of greatness in you? And then . . . " He took a step toward her, gazing down at her as if she were an absorbing problem. "There is the fact that Lord Voldemort was interested in you . . . and, they say, defeated by you . . . How could this have come about unless you could work magic to rival the power of that great wizard?"
"Oh," Harriet said, her nails digging into her palm as she gripped her wand. "Is that what you want to know? Well, I can answer that one—it was my mother. My common, Muggle-born mother," she spat, watching Riddle's face go curiously rigid, like a grimace frozen midway. "When that loser Voldemort came to kill me, she wouldn't let him, she died so he wouldn't, and he couldn't touch me. There's your answer—it was a Mudblood who defeated Voldemort, who turned him into a wreck—"
She choked off because something was blocking her windpipe, not Riddle's touch but his magic. She saw his face contorted, his eyes bright scarlet—she couldn't breathe—
An explosion of golden-orange light boomed between them; the pressure on her throat vanished. Coughing, hacking, Harriet pressed a hand to her throat and sagged forward, trying not to fall flat on her face or drop her wand. It was still sparking in her hand.
"Well," Riddle said, a bit breathlessly. "So that was it . . . "
Looking up warily, Harriet saw him brushing his hair down, his expression resuming its smoothness.
"A lucky chance, that was all," he said in a voice as smooth as his face. "It was only a lucky chance that saved you from me . . . Sacrifice . . . that is a powerful magic, yes . . . impossible to guard against . . . but not to overcome."
"From you?" Harriet croaked. "What do you mean, saved me from you?"
Riddle smiled at her, a cruel slit on his handsome face. "Silly, stupid Harriet," he said. "I am Lord Voldemort. He is me, the man I became. Eleven years ago, you faced me at the height of my powers."
Harriet stared up at him. She remembered the face in the back of Quirrell's head, that sickening sight that had hung in her nightmares for weeks, that she still glimpsed there sometimes—she saw that face, and this boy's face, and felt a disorienting familiarity and discordance. They weren't the same, there was nothing about them that was the same . . . that face had been inhuman, flat and smashed, white like maggots, with bloody eyes . . . this face was handsome and mobile . . . and yet there was something else, something curious and sadistic . . . and that was the exact same.
From somewhere inside her, a fierce thought rose up: And he hurts when I touch him, just like with Quirrell.
"Let us see what you make of me," Riddle said softly, staring at her with a kind of hunger that made her feel sick, like her clothes were peeling away, like her skin was coming off. "Now that your mewling Mudblood mother isn't here to save your neck."
He turned and tilted his head back, as if looking up at the statue.
Get close to him—
Harriet tried to stand. Her left knee and right ankle screamed with pain, and she wobbled, staggering, falling back down. He was too far away. She needed to get him back over here, she needed to distract him.
"Oh yeah," she said loudly, hating the way her voice shook, like her hands, her arms, her whole body was already shaking. "You're a r-real great wizard. You killed a girl with that Basilisk fifty years ago, and now you're going to kill two more. R-really impressive. It's no wonder you're afraid of Dumbledore—"
Riddle turned back toward her, his face more than ever like that thing on the back of Quirrell's head.
"Lord Voldemort fears nothing," Riddle hissed at her in English, or maybe Parseltongue, maybe both, the syllables blurring together, pressed between his bared teeth.
"Yeah, he does," Harriet challenged, speaking wildly, "he's scared of Dumbledore, always has been, because Dumbledore's the greater wizard and he knows it—"
She was saying it to try to anger him into losing his cool, and had the sickening satisfaction of seeing his face contort. She tried not to look at Ginny in case he did something, because he was nearer to her; wondering if she'd even be able to lift Ginny and run from the Basilisk at the same time with an injured knee. They hadn't learned how to make things float yet, certainly not something as heavy as a person.
Then she heard the cry of a bird . . . its symphony of a voice. . .
In a blur of scarlet and gold, a magnificent bird, like Dumbledore's phoenix all grown up, came soaring through the greenish air with trails of glittering gold streaming behind him. For a wild, hopeful second, Harriet thought it must be coming ahead of Professor Dumbledore—but the bird fluttered its wings and alighted on her shoulder, dropping in her lap . . .
. . . the Sorting Hat?
Riddle thought this was the best joke yet. He laughed and laughed until the only sound in Harriet's head was his laughter, ringing off the slimy walls, the snake-wrapped pillars, Slytherin's statue, and she gripped the Sorting Hat in her slimy hands, wanting to strangle him with it, wanting to cry.
"That's what Dumbledore sends his great defender!" Riddle said delightedly, amusement gross in his face. "A chicken and an old hat! Oh, that's priceless. Don't you see, Harriet Potter? Placing your faith in that old man is like putting water in a sieve and expecting it to be there when you need it later. Well."
He smiled down at her and Ginny. "Good-bye, Harriet. It's not been entertaining, but it has been enlightening."
He turned away again, walking off, and this time Harriet had nothing.
"Speak to me, Salazar," Riddle hissed, his voice as bloodless as the Basilisk's, crawling under Harriet's skin, burrowing beneath her fingernails, winding into her brain like worms. "Give to me, greatest of the Hogwarts four."
The whole chamber rumbled like thunder. From behind Slytherin's statue, something was moving . . . a portion of the stone was drawing back into blackness . . . Harriet flung herself forward and grabbed Ginny's hands. Her skin was cold as marble and she didn't move.
The whole floor shook as the Basilisk moved.
Well, Dumbledore had given her one thing that could help: a blindfold. She crammed the Hat onto her head, wrapped her arms around Ginny's middle, and dragged. Her knees spiked with pain, her shoes slid on the slick floor, and Ginny was so heavy, weighing like she was dead . . .
Fawkes fluttered off her shoulder, brushing her face with wings as soft as clouds. Where are you going?! she wanted to scream. Not that he'd been any bloody use—
The whole chamber shuddered, water rippling and surging over Harriet's socks as the Basilisk slithered toward them, the sound of its scales on the floor hissing as fast as a bullet train.
"I've got you, Ginny," she gritted, her feet sliding, her heart beating a rhythm of panic in her chest. "I've got you—"
Then the phoenix screamed one shrill, glorious note, and something fell through the top of the Hat, hard, and bashed Harriet on the head.
Lockhart's office had been hastily ransacked, a wardrobe flung open, some books tumbled off a shelf, pictures knocked off every imaginable surface, their frames shattered by trampling feet. A haze of smoke thickened the air; the fire was belching and guttering.
"Done a bunk, he has," said Sprout, one third satisfied, one disbelieving, one disgusted.
"It seems as if it didn't take much," said Minerva with a Gryffindor's patent repugnance for cowardice.
Severus knelt next to the fireplace and extinguished the flames. Inside lay a heap of ash . . . and paper.
"He was burning something," he said. "Handwritten notes, it looks like."
"Well, we'll leave it for later." Minerva's voice was firm, but her hands were gripping each other so tightly, the pressure bled her skin white. "We haven't time to fool with this—this fool. I know we've searched the castle from Sibyl's tower to Severus's dungeon, but we haven't searched well enough."
"As before," Flitwick said, "I suggest we concentrate on those parts of the castle that are empty of portraits. The Heir of Slytherin has clearly surmised that he must confine his attacks to areas where he won't be detected except by chance."
Cunning, like a Slytherin, Severus could feel them all thinking.
"It's too bad it's a buggering secret chamber," Sprout said without humor.
"It's too dreadful to imagine He Who Must Not Be Named using one of our students in this way," Flitwick said.
"They could be doing it willingly," Severus pointed out coldly. Flitwick looked wounded; but then, he was softhearted.
"Or by Imperius," Minerva said sharply. "That was one of You Know Who's specialties, making marionettes out of people."
I think I know more about the Dark Lord's specialties than you, Severus thought, but he managed to bite his tongue on the words.
"See here, we're not going to find the bally Chamber by fighting," Sprout said simply. "If we could, I'd let you both at it, but we've got to be practical and keep our—what the devil?"
This last was said to the Fat Friar, who had come rushing in through the wall in a streak of opalescent silver.
"Professors," he said, slightly out of breath even though he didn't breathe or feel fatigue, "a group of students are out of their House and won't return at our bidding—"
"If it's those wretched bloody Gryffindors," Severus started in a flash of fury.
"Severus Snape!" Minerva retorted.
"In fact," said the Friar apologetically, "they are Gryffindors . . . I'm terribly sorry . . . "
Harriet might have blacked out, but it must only have been a couple of seconds, because when she jerked awake she was still alive, the hat was still covering her face, and the whole world was shaking around her. She clearly wasn't dead, which must mean hardly any time had passed at all.
Her hears filled with the sound of something massive slithering, and Riddle's voice shouting out its Parseltongue. Something screamed, so high and piercing and gut-wrenching that all the hairs on Harriet's body stood up and her fingertips tingled, her heart quailed.
"No!" Riddle screamed, too, the phoenix echoing them, so the whole chamber reverberated with their cries.
She couldn't turn and look or she'd die. She pushed herself up—and the hat fell off her head. No! Arms shaking and heavy, she snatched it back up, keeping one hand gripping Ginny's wrist—
And a sword clattered out, magnificent and golden, glittering with rubies in the greenish gloom of the Chamber.
If Harriet thought anything at all, which she wasn't sure she did, it happened at light speed. She grabbed the sword and flung herself over Ginny, rolling and scrambling across the slick black floor, ignoring the pain in her knees, her shoulders, her head, her whole body, to where the diary had last lain. She couldn't see well at all, and the book was the same color as the stones in the floor, but it had been over here, next to the water.
"What are—NO!" Riddle shrieked, from much closer than Harriet would have thought, or wanted him to be. A moment later, he'd grabbed her by the hair.
A searing, blinding pain spiked through her head, whiting out the world. Riddle's scream curdled her blood. She swung the sword around, spinning after it, but he'd already let go, and she felt the sword's tip nick something as he lurched away.
"KILL HER!" he shrieked at the Basilisk, and in the whirl of fear and panic and adrenaline, Harriet looked toward it.
But it was blinded. Its enormous eyes had been punctured, gouged, turned to a bloody mess in its face. Even though it was a giant monster snake, it was in agony, Harriet could tell, disoriented and confused—and enraged. It reared, turned its ruined head toward her, and surged.
Scrambling, she threw herself after the diary again. She had to destroy it—if she could stab it, maybe—
Her hand hit the diary. The Basilisk's weight and power shaking the floor rattled all the teeth in her head. She looked up, into its mouth that was opening, stinking, festering, foul, rowed with teeth that she could see glistening, even without her glasses, even in the gloom—
As it came down, she grabbed the sword with both hands and thrust up, as hard as she could.
The look on Minerva's face would have been something to savor, had Severus not been in such a state of rage.
"Where are they?" Sprout asked, already half out the door.
"The last I left them—with the Grey Lady following—they were headed toward the vault of staircases—"
Minerva, Sprout and Flitwick dashed toward the Grand Staircase, which would lead directly to the vault; but Severus took the opposite route, heading to approach it from the side. He gained the upper corridor just in time to see Miss Granger, and Miss Granger alone, throwing herself at the peeling door of that out-of-order bathroom he'd caught Lily's daughter emerging from only yesterday; God, it was only yesterday.
"Miss Granger!" he shouted at her, but the door was already banging shut. Cursing, he hurtled through the door—
A large hole stood in the wall, leading into a festering pipe. Puddled on the floor at its base was a mound of silvery-looking cloth. There was no sign of Miss Granger, no noise but the drip of water somewhere in that desolate space.
"A fucking girl's loo?" he snarled, hoisting himself into the pipe, where the dank of centuries filled his nose and mouth and throat.
The bathroom Albus changed the subject rather than speak about? whispered his Inner Slytherin.
The shock of that thought hit him in the chest—and then it seamlessly turned into the sensation of falling down, down, down, as if through time. He gripped his wand, ready for the spell to arrest his momentum, and cast it just in time to prevent himself crashing into a pile of rotting old bones.
Miss Granger gasped and scrabbled away from him, but he moved as quick as a mongoose to grab her by the arm.
"What," he hissed, "do you think you are doing, you abysmally foolish girl?"
"H-Harry and Ginny are down here!" she said tremulously, but she didn't cower or cringe. She did wince, though, when his hand tightened cruelly on her arm. He forced himself to let go of her, to preserve his calm, or at least not to raze the tunnel down around their heads. No, if he were going to lose the last fingernail grip on his control, it would be because of Lily's fucking bloody fool of a daughter.
"I will find them," he snarled at Granger. "You, Miss Granger, will wait here."
"B-but—"
"You will wait here or I swear by every god known to man, I will see you expelled."
He could see dread warring with every Gryffindor impulse of her heart, fighting for plain dominance on her face. Hermione Granger, model student, who in four terms had only lost points twice, who was desperate for approval from authority to the point of alienating her peers, would surely die rather than be expelled—
"I'm n-not staying here," she managed. "S-sir."
GRYFFINDORS, he almost screamed.
Miss Potter can only benefit from having a friend of such tenacious spirit, Dumbledore had said.
"Very well, then," he snarled, rejecting the thought of Stunning her and leaving her there. "Get yourself killed. I'm not writing to your mother to tell her."
That made her flinch, but then she just raised her chin and said, "I know."
He pushed her behind him and then ignored her, ducking low stalactites and stumbling on particularly slick rocks. Granger scrambled along behind him, saying nothing, breathing audibly.
Shaking, Harriet pulled herself free of the dead Basilisk's mouth. Its fangs tore at her clothes. She felt funny . . . odd . . . distant from herself . . . hurting everywhere, but that was nothing new . . .
Except in her elbow, where pain raged like a lightning storm.
Trying not to retch, she groped for the tip of the fang and pulled it free. She didn't manage not to scream as the flesh in her arm pulled with it, and she fell down, sobbing, gritting her teeth, the bloody fang clattering next to her.
"You. . ."
Riddle's shoe tapped into her line of sight. Despising him, she raised her head enough to see his face hovering far above her, contorted with triumph and with hatred.
"That creature was over a thousand years old," he said, disgusted. "I do truly despise Gryffindors."
"Piss . . . off," Harriet croaked. Every part of her felt like it was being Crucioed. Her elbow hurt worst of all, the wall of pain spreading out from there, growing as it blazed up her arm.
"No matter," Riddle said softly. "His sacrifice, at least, has ensured your death. The Basilisk's poison will kill you shortly . . . and then I'll be on my way."
As Harriet lay panting, all her nerves on fire, her skin feeling so icy cold it burned, a dim thought pushed to the front of her mind:
The DIARY.
She rolled painfully onto her back, gritting her teeth, hoping Riddle would think she was doing it to die; turned her head away from him to look for the diary, praying he'd just think she didn't want to look at him. Her hand groped for the Basilisk fang, her eyes searched for the little black book. . .
And there it was.
"Going to try and stab me again, Harriet?" Riddle asked above her. "Really, with you dying, I think I ought to be able to dodge."
"Yeah?" Harriet ground out, wheezing. "Dodge—this."
And with the last of her strength she rolled the rest of the way and plunged the fang into the diary. Ink gushed out, drenching her hand and wrist, and Riddle screamed, long and high, longer and higher, and she sagged onto her back to watch him die, the man who'd killed her Mum and Dad and Ginny and herself. He was dissolving, like a photograph thrown into the fire, warping and coming apart in sticky black spots, like film melting. . . It was the last thing she was going to see, and it probably should have felt better, but it didn't.
He was gone.
She closed her eyes. Something brushed feather soft against her forehead, and chirruped, and honey-golden drops melted into her heart.
"Sorry it didn't work out, Fawkes," she mumbled, or tried to. She didn't know if she succeeded.
Then, she slipped away, Fawkes's song running like golden water through the dark.
Ahead, a greenish light melted out of the blackness. The source shone out of an open door embellished with a raised relief of emerald-eyed serpents.
The stone corridor was completely silent.
Severus pulled himself up into the elevated doorway and descended into an eerie chamber of glimmering black water and stone, lit by a greenish light that reminded him of his own dungeons. Ahead, a burst of color, of red and gold—
Dumbledore's phoenix, and the tangle of Ginevra Weasley's hair, spread out on the black floor. The phoenix was perched on the chest of Lily's daughter, who lay completely motionless.
"Oh," Granger gasped, like she really couldn't say any more. It was more than Severus himself could do. "Oh—"
The phoenix spread its wings and flitted off the girl's body.
Somehow Severus found he'd moved over to the girl, around the massive form of the snake that had sagged, dead, onto its side. He didn't remember moving or kneeling over her, but there he was, looking down on her. She was filthy, covered in ink and slime and blood. Her face was turned toward them, missing its glasses, looking still and peaceful.
Granger was sobbing, brushing at the girl's hair, pushing it away from her face, crying Harriet, Harry, please.
He felt something flutter against his fingertips. At some point, he had picked up the girl's hand and wrapped his hand around her wrist.
He was feeling her pulse.
"Miss Granger, shut up," he said—or he tried to. His voice seemed to have gone.
There was a pulse in her throat, too. It was getting stronger as he felt it.
A groan came from nearby, and a cough: the Weasley girl was moving.
"Oh!" Granger gasped again. She scrambled over to the She-Weasley. "Ginny!"
"H-Hermione?" the Weasley girl said in a quavering voice. "Where—how—oh!"
Severus ignored their bleating. He turned Lily's daughter's face toward him, checking her for head injuries. She didn't seem to have any, although there were blood-flecked scrapes on every visible part of her skin, and the left knee of her jeans was torn and stained. Her pulse, though, was gaining strength under his hand. It would probably be a good idea, he thought, to speak her name, to wake her, but his voice seemed to have gone to that place where all his emotions had fled, not simply into Occlumency but somewhere else altogether, somewhere outside of him, leaving him an empty shell with no power but automation.
But then she stirred and opened her eyes.
She stared at him, in that unconcerned, unfocused way of the recently unconscious. Then she blinked, recognition and confusion coming together.
"Professor?" she croaked. Off to the side, he heard Granger and the she-Weasley bleat in tandem.
At the sight of those eyes, Severus came entirely back to himself—all his terror, his rage, his frustration, his guilt, his relief, all bound together and returning as powerful as the tide. They crashed through him, so strong he felt his own foundations reverberate. He should shake her until her teeth rattled loose, scream at her until his throat ran dry, lock her up someplace where she couldn't be heroic ever again and nothing dangerous could touch her, because the suicidal little fool had proved she couldn't be trusted—
"It was Voldemort," she said in an exhausted, breathless voice, pushing herself up so she could point at something near his knee, but he didn't look, he didn't give a goddamn fuck. "Only he was calling himself Tom Riddle, it wasn't Ginny, sir, I swear—"
"It w-was his diary!" She-Weasley sobbed.
"He was living in the diary, I stabbed it with the Basilisk fang, And it exploded ink and he disappeared, Tom Riddle, I mean—"
"Shut up," Severus said, his first words since he'd told Granger to stay behind him. "Just fucking shut up before I kill all three of you."
They did, the Weasley girl even stopping her crying, each of them staring at him with varying levels of shock and wariness. He forced himself to stand and pace away from them before he did something irreparable. Everything inside him felt raw with fury, with, with—
A cool breeze passed over him and something sharp pierced his shoulder as a weight landed there—
Dumbledore's phoenix. It regarded him with bright black eyes and trilled.
"The same goes for you," he said, but he could feel the murderous rage ebbing. Still, it had a long way to go. "Goddamn you."
The phoenix chirruped and nuzzled him.
When he finally stalked back to the children, he found the girl holding a garish, glittering sword inlaid with rubies, and wondered if it was in self-defense. Clumped together, the three girls peered up at him warily. Lily's daughter almost relaxed when she saw the bird sitting on his shoulder.
"Can you walk?" he snarled at them.
They all nodded, not seeming to dare speak yet. Good.
"Then get up and follow me."
They did, clutching each other's hands.
And he knew he was going to have a long—a very long—talk with Albus fucking Dumbledore and Lucius motherfucking Malfoy.