Chapter 3: Fyre... WORKS.
Her wand in her hand, Amelia Bones nodded to the auror team who had turned up a few minutes ago to tell her that damn near every alarm the Ministry had went off at the same time. Fire protection charms had triggered, dark magic ones, multiple intruder alerts, you name it. The floo system had been playing silly buggers too, which to her suggested that someone was deliberately interfering with it, which made getting there difficult since there were anti-apparation protections on the place. The only way to get inside was either to apparate to one of the external entrances, then go in that way, or use the floo, which of course needed it to be working.
However, mere moments ago whatever, or whoever, had been causing the interference had stopped, and the floo had connected to the other end. So they were preparing to go through and find out what on earth was going on. She made the assumption it was an attack of some sort and as such her team was geared up ready for anything, but she'd be very pleased to find it was something less catastrophic, like someone falling asleep and accidentally tripping the alarms. Mind you, they wouldn't be pleased in that scenario, but overall she'd prefer incompetence to maliciousness. Unfortunately she had a sinking feeling that this was unlikely considering all the other issues facing them at the moment.
Hopefully she could take control before Fudge turned up to stick his oar in and muddy the waters as he always did. Probably with bloody Malfoy tagging along whispering his lies into the idiot's ear while filling his pocket with gold…
She so very much wished she could simply stun the pair of them and stick them into a very deep hole for the next few years. It would make life so much easier to deal with. But that would only cause trouble, so she had to work around the problem they represented as best she could.
The lead auror jumped into the green flames and vanished after taking a deep breath, the other three and Amelia following right on his heels. They spun through whatever it was the floo traveled via, something she'd never been entirely clear on, and emerged into the atrium of the MoM, each of them rolling in different directions and ending up in a crouch with their wands searching for targets in a well-trained breaching move.
The sight that met her eyes was not in any way what she'd been expecting.
Firstly, there was a deeply unnerving skittering sound coming from all around the entire vast room, accompanied by strange motions in the shadows, even above them. Several bodies lay on the floor, a number of those in black robes with familiar masks either on them or near them. As far as she could tell from here, they were almost certainly deceased, as were two other people some distance away. In one of those cases the lack of a leg and a remarkable amount of blood spatter was something of a giveaway, while the other one had no visible injuries although that didn't mean much.
Further towards the back of the room near the lifts were living people. One was instantly recognizable as Dumbledore, who stood out in a crowd even under the best of circumstances. The man had absolutely no taste where it came to his robes, even by wizarding terms. She was well aware, since she had a lot more contact with the outside world than most magicals, that wizarding taste would be considered odd at best to non-magical people even in the more subdued cases, which he very much wasn't.
She could see quite a lot of people she recognized. Moody, Kingsley, and Tonks were near a group of six obvious Hogwarts students, the presence of these something of a mystery considering the hour and where they were. One was the Potter boy. Which just added to the list of questions she had. With a shock she noticed that one of the two remaining people in that particular sub-group was someone she had not expected to see tonight, except possibly over a drawn wand, that being the escaped prisoner Sirius Black. He was standing next to Remus Lupin, former Defense Professor at Hogwarts.
Some distance on the other side of Dumbledore were another group, including some other recognizable faces. All ones from the old wizards Order of the Phoenix, a group than she found irritating at best much of the time. And yes, she was well aware of it, despite what some of them thought.
All that she took in within seconds. Her aurors had also finished looking around and were now examining the standing people, although they weren't turning their backs on the bodies on the floor even so.
What was attracting their, and her, attention was the remaining figure. Tall, although not as tall as Dumbledore, slender, apparently female, probably young… and wearing the strangest clothes Amelia had ever seen. Including a mask that was… unsettling. It had yellowish eyes set into something very much based on an insect of some sort, the rest of the… costume, perhaps? being dark gray or black, including gloves and boots. It looked armored to her, although not in way she'd seen before. And over the torso the probable girl was wearing a sort of jacket or coat that came down below her waist, which looked for all the world to be made of fire!
Even to a witch that was definitely out of the ordinary. The damn thing was clearly somehow shaped out of flames, but not normal flames. With a nasty jolt to her heart Amelia realized where she'd seen that color, and the strange shapes that came and went almost subliminally when you saw it out of the corner of your eye.
'Merlin's balls, that's fiendfyre,' she thought in horror. 'How?'
It should have been impossible. Fiendfyre was completely uncontrollable. All you could do is aim it, and with luck survive the resulting inferno. And if you were very lucky, put it down after calling it up.
Most wizards who tried using it weren't that lucky. There was a reason the spell was so feared.
And she was wearing it as clothes? What the hell was going on?
She looked at her team, who looked back uncertainly. After a moment she indicated with her head that two of them should go and check the bodies while the other pair should accompany here. Amelia started carefully approaching Dumbledore, who was looking at the girl and saying something. She noticed that he didn't have his wand out and very slightly relaxed, because presumably that meant he didn't believe a threat was present despite the impossibility of the fiery coat.
As she neared, Dumbledore looked around. "Ah, Amelia," he said, sounding like he was greeting her having bumped into her in the corridor, although with a faint odd note in his voice that made her curious since she could swear it was nervousness. Not something she'd heard from him before. "How nice of you to join us."
"What's going on, Dumbledore?" she demanded. Waving a hand at the damage to the walls and floor, where it was clear someone had been having quite the fight recently, she went on, "What happened? Every alarm you can imagine went off, no one could make it through the floo, we had no idea what was happening here, and there are bodies over there."
"All dead, Madam Bones," one of the aurors who had been sent to check reported as he came back and joined them. The other one was still carefully checking the corpses. "Those ones all have Dark Marks." He pointed at the black robed figures.
She looked at him, then back to Dumbledore, who seemed… resigned? "Dead Death Eaters lying around the Atrium, alarms for dark magic, fire, intruders… An attack?"
"Yes. Voldemort made his move earlier tonight." The elderly wizard looked slightly amused at the reaction the name produced in most of those present. Moody didn't flinch, the students for some reason just looked blank, and the costumed girl peered around at everyone else when they flinched and seemed to shake her head slightly.
"Damn it," she growled, not being all that surprised. Despite what the Minister kept saying, 'Lord Thingy' had definitely returned during that fiasco at the Triwizard tournament, something she still felt had been an incredibly stupid move on the part of the Ministry. Potter had sworn up and down that the bloody maniac had been resurrected, even though Fudge had instantly gone into covering his arse mode and denying it as a possibility with every breath he took. But there was just too much evidence to prove it even at the time, in her view, and at this point it was a foregone conclusion. The Minister might claim otherwise but then he was a coward and an idiot.
So while the official policy was still that the Dark Lord Voldemort was dead and gone, no one with the merest smidgen of brains believed that.
And now the bastard had openly attacked the Ministry of Magic itself. How was Fudge going to deny this? She had little doubt that he'd try even with this many witnesses and all the physical evidence. It would have helped if they'd managed to catch the sod…
"I assume he got away, then?" she queried fatalistically. Oddly enough Potter began laughing and the girl who was standing next to him… Granger, she remembered… was wearing a strange expression that seemed to be a mix between satisfaction and humor with a tinge of worry.
"Not… as such, no," Dumbledore replied after an awkward pause, glancing at the costumed girl who was just standing there, so still it was like she was a statue. The effect was somewhat disconcerting but Amelia had more important things to worry about at the moment.
"You mean he's still here?" she shouted. "Why didn't you lead with that?" She looked rapidly around, while motioning to her aurors to form up. "Where is he?"
"You're standing on him," the costumed girl said in a creepily flat voice. Amelia stopped dead and looked at her, then cast her eyes downwards. The glossy black marble floor had a fine layer of… ash?
Raising her gaze to the girl, very confused, she opened her mouth to ask what on earth she meant, but Dumbledore sighed and diverted her attention. "Voldemort is dead. Again."
She and her team all stared at him. After quite a long moment, she folded her arms and gave him a hard look. "Explain. Now."
"He didn't want to give up and tried to kill everyone, so I got rid of him," the girl said before Dumbledore could do more than begin to say anything. He closed his mouth and made a gesture of resignation. Amelia transferred her attention fully to the oddly still girl, who was looking at them with her head slightly on one side as if she found them fascinating.
"And you are, Miss?" she asked as calmly as she could, wondering what fresh hell this whole situation was bringing down on them.
"My name is Skitter, and…"
She was interrupted by the floos all around the room beginning to flare to life, one after another, and lots of people rush out of them into the atrium. Almost every one of the new arrivals, which seemed to mostly be Ministry employees, other aurors, random departmental heads, and finally the Minister himself in pyjamas under a pinstriped cloak, spotted the corpses scattered untidily around the place and froze, staring at them in horror.
"Oh, Morgana," Amelia breathed quietly, feeling that the already confusing situation was inevitably heading towards being a night she was going to remember for a long time, and not in a good way.
Fudge, looking stunned, which fitted his face all too well a tiny traitorous part of her mind whispered, rushed over after he overcame his shocked paralysis and tore his gaze away from the bodies. "Amelia! Dumbledore!" he gasped as if he'd run a marathon. He was sweating and pale-faced, his eyes frantic. "Merlin's beard! What on earth is going on! Who are those…" He half-turned and pointed unsteadily at the bodies, which some more aurors and a few nosy bystanders were now investigating. "Who did this? Why are there dead people lying all over the… My word." He seemed to run out of the ability to speak and mopped his brow with a handkerchief he pulled from his cloak pocket. His hand was shaking violently and it was obvious he was on the verge of panicking completely.
"Calm yourself, Cornelius, the danger has passed," Dumbledore assured him calmly, although Amelia didn't miss the way his eyes momentarily shifted to Skitter, who was still standing silently, watching and listening closely. She looked over to see Moody also watching, the old mad bastard meeting her gaze with his. He looked wary, but at the same time almost like he was finding this entertaining in some warped manner.
He'd always had an odd sense of humor, she thought as she turned back to Fudge and Dumbledore.
"But what happened here, Dumbledore?" Fudge demanded, slowly catching his breath and appearing relieved that there was no immediate threat apparent. He looked around again. "Why are those children here? Who is that?" He pointed at Skitter. "Amelia? Is this one of yours? Why aren't you doing something?"
"She's not one of mine, and what would you have me do, Minister?" Amelia replied with great patience, inwardly wishing the fool had stayed at home. "I only just arrived myself and I still don't know what happened. Perhaps if you stop querying Dumbledore he can explain."
"Yes, yes, of course," the pudgy man bleated, mopping his brow again. "Well, Dumbledore? Can you explain what's going on? The dead people? All these children and everyone else? We're waiting."
He sounded impatient now as if he had somewhere to be, which was typical of the man. Amelia suppressed a tiny sigh and saw a twinkle in Dumbledore's eyes as if he fully understood her feelings and shared them.
The elderly wizard opened his mouth and began speaking, only to stop as a shout came from over by the dead death eaters. "Minister! This is Thorfinn Rowle!" Amelia fancied Dumbledore sighed faintly as the Minister spun around, his eyes wide.
"Rowle?" he squeaked. "But he's…"
"Dead as mutton," the auror next to the man who had shouted put in, giving the man an annoyed glare.
Hurrying over, Fudge stared down at the corpse. "My word. I was speaking to him only yesterday. How ever could someone such as him be here, like this! What happened to him?"
"Poison, looks like," the auror replied, waving his wand over the body. "An awful lot of it. Doxy venom, some sort of spider I'm not familiar with… wasps too. I can't even identify most of it. Enough to kill a giant though, whatever it is."
The man who'd shouted, who was someone Amelia recognized by sight as a toady of Fudge's but couldn't remember the name of for the life of her since they all tended to merge together into a mass of obsequiousness, had wandered over to another body and bent over it. He pulled the mask off with a sort of sick interest, the auror who'd been talking to Fudge snapping his head around as he caught sight out of the corner of his eye. "Oi! This is a crime scene, stop mucking about with my evidence you pillock," he roared, dashing over and grabbing the idiot by his sleeve then hauling him upright and shaking him.
"That's… it's Peter Pettigrew," the fool stammered as his head wobbled back and forth like a wobbling thing.
Amelia stared, Fudge twitched violently and hurried across to see for himself, and behind them all she heard Sirius Black shout, "YES!" at the top of his voice in a triumphant manner.
"Oh for…" she muttered to herself, feeling that things were getting out of hand.
"Is it always this chaotic around here?" Skitter's voice asked in an almost disinterested way. Amelia looked over her shoulder to see the girl watching the proceedings curiously. Potter and Black were urgently talking together, she noticed, but that was almost irrelevant at the moment.
"Unfortunately this isn't quite as unusual as you'd hope," she admitted, "although we don't normally have quite as many corpses lying around."
"Wizards. Worse than capes, it looks like," Skitter commented, making Amelia wonder what that meant. "Hey! Keep it down over there, we're trying to have a conversation here!" she called more loudly, which resulted in nothing useful at all. Fudge and his toady were gibbering as the faces of more 'upstanding citizens' were uncovered by the aurors, who the minister had ordered to do so, and looked very upset. The aurors were taking notes, or keeping the growing crowd of onlookers back from the scene since the floos were still pouring out people. The noise was incredible and the overall effect one of absolute panic tempered with the sort of curiosity that makes people watch an accident happen and do nothing to prevent it.
"Oh, dear, this is becoming somewhat silly," Dumbledore said quietly, stroking his beard and observing with interest.
"It's getting fucking idiotic is what it is," Skitter growled. She walked forward, Amelia and Dumbledore moving out of the way as neither was particularly keen on touching her tame fiendfyre to see if it really was tame. "HEY!" she shouted. "SHUT UP!"
Not one single person paid attention to her at all.
She sighed, then something absolutely nightmarish happened, something that would wake Amelia up in the middle of the night for decades to come and traumatized an entire generation of the wizarding world.
Skitter became annoyed.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Taylor had decided things had gone far enough. These people appeared to be largely idiots going by what was currently happening, although some of them did at least seem to have a reasonable level of competency. Dumbledore, although he was clearly very nervous, was hiding it well under a veneer of calmness. The woman who'd just arrived, Amelia Bones, who was some sort of cop if she was guessing right, and wearing a monocle of all things, gave off an air of authority and intelligence, not to mention resignation when the latest arrival, this Fudge guy, had inserted himself into the situation with all the grace of a drunk hippo. Which he bore some resemblance to, it had to be said…
The guys in red robes were the Bones woman's people, she assumed, based on what was happening and what they were saying, and must be law enforcement. They were doing some sort of forensics investigation of the bodies and weren't pleased that all these other fools had come rushing in and promptly got in the way. And now that one idiot with the ponytail had brought up a name that had caused considerable confusion all around. Which resulted in a hell of a lot of noise and fuss which was starting to become irritating.
Obviously it was time to put a halt to this before it got out of hand.
Sighing faintly, she brought her swarm out of the shadows all around the room, while her fyre jacket sent out a tendril of flame towards the high ceiling. Above them the flames formed into a huge hornet's head, even larger than downstairs, while at the far end of the room another one coalesced out of millions of insects, this one less flamey but in many ways probably even more impressive since it gave off a dull roar and moved in interesting ways as all the component parts of it shifted around. She was particularly pleased with the effect she managed to create in the eyes, using different colored insects and other creatures to highlight the thousands of facets. Overall, it was pretty damn good in her opinion, although she was also fond of the one made of fyre above her.
"SILENCE!" she said through both constructs, and dozens of smaller ones around the edges of the room, her swarm voice merging with the hissing screech the fiendfyre produced with sufficient volume that the floor trembled gently underfoot. The end result was really gratifying. Every single person in the entire room went pale and froze in place, staring at her swarm constructs. Several of them quietly fell over, none of their companions even noticing.
"I HAVE HAD A VERY ANNOYING SERIES OF RECENT EXPERIENCES AND I WOULD LIKE TO CONCLUDE MY BUSINESS HERE AND GO HOME, SO IF YOU WOULD ALL PLEASE STOP ACTING LIKE IDIOTS AND QUIETLY DISPERSE IT WOULD BE MUCH APPRECIATED," she added calmly, the sounds echoing throughout the huge room. "YOUR MAGICAL TERRORIST PROBLEM IS DEALT WITH. MR NOSELESS IS ASH AND ALL HIS PEOPLE ARE DEAD. I WOULD MUCH PREFER TO AVOID ANY MORE TROUBLE. PLEASE DON'T FORCE ME TO DO SOMETHING DRASTIC."
Several more of the wizards present collapsed. The various cops among them were the only ones holding wands, she noticed, and they didn't seem to know where to point them.
Her fyre construct looked around, synced to Taylor's head. She was getting better at using the bizarre senses the fyre provided, and wanted some time to herself to experiment with it, but even without proper vision through it yet she could at least get an impression of sight. That was aided by all the other creatures, of course, so in the end she was able to see literally everyone in the entire building from all sides. Very few people were anywhere but here though. All of them were looking up at the flaming insect head. Behind her, Potter seemed to be grinning to himself and Hermione, who Taylor definitely needed to sit down and talk to at some point, had an expression suggesting she was taking mental notes at quite a rate.
"THANK YOU FOR COMPLYING. UNLESS YOU HAVE OFFICIAL BUSINESS HERE, PLEASE MAKE YOUR WAY TO THE NEAREST EXIT AND LEAVE. NOW."
The fyre head looked around again, then gazed directly at the idiot with the pony tail, who was gaping in horror. "YOU IN THE RED ROBE WITH THE PONYTAIL. THAT MEANS YOU TOO. GO AWAY."
Withdrawing her swarm constructs from around those teleport things that looked like fireplaces for some fucked up Tinker reason, she formed a corridor of writhing shapes on either side of the wizards, gently urging them to take the opening. There was a long, long silence with only the sounds of her insects and the faint crackling of the flaming head to break it, then the man with the ponytail screamed like a little girl and bolted. That broke the ice nicely, causing almost everyone else present to leg it, the fireplace things flaring green as they exited with alacrity. In a gratifyingly short time the room was clear of rubberneckers, only the red robe guys, Dumbledore and his people, the Bones woman, and everyone from downstairs still here. Along with a few unconscious people, but they were at least quiet and out of the way. And that Fudge idiot who looked very much like fudge described the contents of his pants revoltingly well.
Dispersing the swarms back into the shadows, and pulling the flames above her back into the rest of her fyre jacket, Taylor nodded in satisfaction. "That's better," she said, turning to Bones. The woman's monocle had fallen out and was dangling from its string, while she herself was looking at Taylor from wide eyes. Dumbledore was pale again and seemed to be trying to work out whether he could get away with leaving too. "So, as I was saying, my name is Skitter. I'm not from around here."
Bones swallowed hard. "That much I can easily believe," she replied, making a pretty decent attempt at keeping her voice level. Apparently Taylor might have overdone the shock and awe a touch?
She mentally shrugged. Better to make an impression people would remember, or they'd try walking all over you, Lisa had said, and she was probably right there too.
Taylor was going to have some interesting stories to tell her when she got back, but first she had to get back. Which needed these people's cooperation.
That shouldn't be too hard to arrange, she thought as she watched the remaining wizards recover. And if it was, well, she had other things she could encourage them with.
Some of the stuff her power had found way down in the basement of this building was really neat...