Disclaimer: Chances are if you missed the disclaimer in the first chapter, you’re skimming this fic and probably missing more of the story than you think.
Chapter Two
Standing Room Only
Shorner wasn’t a fan of Marx’s work by any stretch of the imagination, but he understood the corollary: If religion was the opiate of the masses, then cynicism was the chosen drug of the enlightened.
The Veil was an age-old conundrum, emphasis on old. Although the magic the prehistoric stone arch possessed helped date it back to before the Druids, nobody had been able to pinpoint the exact era of when it was created. The arch was hewn from a type of volcanic rock, and the area from which it was found had not seen seismic activity for thousands of years. It was a striking thing to behold with sharp, stark lines reminiscent of modern minimalism: all shiny and cold and alien. At first glance, the rare obsidian appeared to be more of an ancient artwork than a powerful magical artefact.
The arch had been located in the stone auditorium since 1597, where the Veil was moved from its original location of the Callanish standing stones in the Western Isles of Scotland. Ironically enough, it had been moved without the least bit of knowledge of what “it” really was. The artefact collected a good amount of dust before an unfortunate individual was accidentally knocked into it. And of course, with the typical “not to be seen again.”
Speculation said that it was a portal to the Underworld, the entrance to Death’s domain, a doorway to different dimensions, with each suggestion getting wilder and crazier than the last. Had the wizards of that time been familiar with twentieth century Muggle culture, they might have called the Veil a ‘UFO’ of the wizarding world. And in 1688, one bright fellow got the idea that the Veil was a less painful and much more humane way of ridding the world of “unsightly” citizens. Turning into a bit of a morbid tradition, the Veil was used in the execution of criminals and political prisoners for the next hundred and fifty years.
Its original use was unknown, but one key thing had been understood – the Veil was a one-way entrance only. What went in did not come back out.
Until Lord Timonzel Sharr, an amateur scholar from a long and ancient line of wizards, decided to test that theory. In leaving behind his wife and his fourteen-year-old heir, Devon Sharr, Timonzel seemed a foolish and blithely suicidal young man.
Two months after he had entered the Veil, Timonzel Sharr walked out a changed individual, dying three years later in 1901 at the age of thirty-six. Full cause of death remained unknown, though records kept said he suffered from bouts of frothing madness for weeks before his eventual passing. Experimenting with the Veil was left alone after that, and the predecessor of the Department of Mysteries took it over as government property.
So when the Veil went active after a century of sullen respite, Shorner doubted coincidence.
What went in did not come back out.
Which he held as a firm mantra when it came to dealing with the Veil’s oddities. Shorner couldn’t really count Timonzel Sharr as an aberrance in the pattern, not when the man went mad and died at only thirty-six, which was unusual for such a long-lived race like wizards. The Veil claimed its own and Timonzel was no exception; it just took him longer to die.
The execution chamber had cleared of its earlier hubbub when the Veil went active, displaying unusual vigour for an artefact that was supposed to dormant. Shorner paced the auditorium floor before the dais, listening to the Veil’s whispering call rise and desist as he passed near it.
“What connects the dots?” Shorner mused, voice echoing off the stone benches of the chamber.
David North stirred from his sprawl on the stone steps. “Sir?”
Unspeakable David North, a Muggle-raised half-blood, had been recruited directly out of school. A Gryffindor alumnus, North specialized in aggressive transfiguration tactics. What he hadn’t stuck on his resume was a knack for tracking charms and a keen eye for patterns or that he’d been caught stalking eight different witches with a very efficient trace network monitoring everything from sleeping and eating to… extracurricular activities.
Given the option between ten months to four years in Azkaban and working for the Department of Mysteries?
Tough choice. Shorner had snatched North’s file up almost as soon as it hit the desk. Keep your friends close, your enemies closer, and your Peeping Toms under an un-ironic eye of their own.
“Maybe we’re looking at this wrong.” Shorner pushed the heavy canvas of his white lab robes back and stuck his hands in his pockets as he surveyed the raised dais with the Veil perched atop. “Maybe it never entered it.”
North’s eyebrows rose. “I’m not following your train of thought, Sherlock.”
Used to his assistant’s random Muggle references, Shorner didn’t bat an eyelash. “We’re all operating under the assumption that whatever came through the Veil had to enter it in the first place.”
North whistled dramatically and wiggled his fingers in Shorner’s direction.
Ignoring North’s antics, Shorner continued his train of thought, things beginning to click into place. “We’ve collected a magical signature from the spell residue left on the archway, we just can’t match it to anyone because nobody saw who entered the Veil and the instruments aren’t picking up any anomalies.”
He paused, watching as the filmy grey shroud of the Veil drifted in the air like a ghost. “Maybe nobody went in.”
“Something came through,” replied North as he tipped his head back to stare at the ceiling, blonde hair falling out of its messy tail at the nape of his neck. “What if it came from the other side?” He let out a dramatic gasp. “Oh no!”
“What if we’re looking in the wrong place?” Shorner mused.
“Wrong place?”
“A magical signature that powerful doesn’t go unnoticed around here. Someone else probably caught the foreign magic on their network and they have no idea what they’re dealing with.”
“Neither do we.” North rolled his eyes. “Why are we doing this anyway? Shouldn’t the interns be handling something this basic?”
“The Veil is a pet project of mine. All information or anomalies get passed on to me,” Shorner replied, distracted by a sudden flash of intuition.
“And?” North asked.
“I want you to check the surrounding trace nets for unidentifiable surges between 0800 and 1100 this morning.”
“What are you looking for?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even know if you’ll find anything.”
The cry of pain was a crow’s caw in his ears.
Seventeen-year-old Harry Potter stumbled over the smoking remains of one rather unlucky wizard slumped across the rubble of a storefront. The scent of cooked meat hung thick and cloying over the place, almost drowning out the hot metal tang of burning things. Broken glass glittered like gemstones on the scorched cobblestones.
Diagon Alley lay in pieces. The Death Eaters had vanished, having apparated out long before the concussion blasts went off.
The wail rose again, too loud in the eerie stillness of the winding alleyway. “Please! Help me, dear God, help!”
Glass crunched under Harry’s boots. “Where are you!” he cried out, disoriented in the mess that used to be a busy street. Harry ducked under a heavy lintel that had fallen across the way, the air leaving his lungs as the gash on his abdomen split open again and started to bleed.
His grip on his wand slipped a bit before he could manage a mild healing charm, blood coating the palm of his hand. Harry wasn’t sure, but from the stabbing ache deep inside his belly, he guessed something important had ruptured when the explosion blasted him into the side of a building.
Smoke drifted through the alley, hazy and pungent. Whole shops were demolished, spilling their wares onto the streets. Twenty feet away, a hand peaked out from the debris, dusty from the pulverized stone that had once been a storefront.
“Hello?” Harry called out.
“Here! I’m here! Oh god!” came the voice from behind the wreckage.
Harry rounded the ruins, his robes snagging on the sharp edges. “I see you – I’m headed your way!”
The man lay half-buried under a piece of roofing, heavy stone block pining it and him to the ground. He was young, maybe a few years older than Harry himself, sandy hair matted with blood and glass. He didn’t look good.
Harry dropped to his knees beside him, reaching out to grasp the man’s flailing hand. “Hey, I’m here.”
“Please,” the man gasped, a mist of tiny red droplets splattering the area around his nose and mouth. “Please, I can’t move!”
“I know,” Harry told the dying wizard. “I’m not going anywhere until we can get you out of here.”
The man’s eyes were white around the edges with pain and fear and Harry realized he couldn’t see. He’d been close to ground zero where the blasts went off, searing his retinas. “Wh-who?” Blood burbled in the man’s throat.
Harry tightened his grasp on the man’s hand. “My name’s Harry. What’s yours?”
“Aaron,” the man choked out. Aaron’s ribs were concave all through the left side, punched in like a broken drum. The whole of his left side had taken the brunt of impact and by the weakening of his grip, it didn’t look like he had long.
“Aaron,” Harry repeated. “What House were you in, Aaron?”
“Raven – ” Aaron spit up more blood before he could finish the word. His grip spasmed, body jerking erratically as it worked for air that would never come. And then he stilled, blood running from his nostrils.
Harry bowed his head and folded Aaron’s hand over his body. Sitting back on his heels, Harry swallowed back the lump of emotion in his throat, anger warring with exhaustion. The concussion made it hard to follow a single train of thought and he wondered how he was going to get out of here.
He wasn’t usually this slow, but it took him a bit to understand that the blood seeping into the knees of his jeans wasn’t all from Aaron’s corpse. The wound had split open again, warm blood soaking into the hemline of his jeans.
“Fuck!” he ground out, placing a hand over the injury as he tried to halt the sluggish seep of blood.
“We’ve got a live one!”
Harry flinched at the loud voice, landing sideways across Aaron’s corpse. The lime green robes of a mediwizard flashed in the corner of his eye.
Rock shifted beside him. “Careful!” Harry shouted. “This thing could come down on me at any moment.”
Footsteps clambered over the rubble behind him. “My God! Somebody actually survived this,” a woman muttered.
A face topped with mousy brown hair appeared in his line of sight. “Sir? How badly are you hurt?” She raised her wand to shine a light in Harry’s eyes, brushing a bit of his fringe away from the cut on his head. Her eyes widened and she gestured frantically at her companion standing behind him. “Merlin’s balls! Vivien, get the stretcher! It’s Harry Potter!”
An increase in rain silenced the uproar of voices in his head. The sharp smell of wet tarmac replaced the phantom smells of burnt flesh and ozone. Overhead, the sign of the Leaky Cauldron creaked in the weak breeze that had managed to slink through the dim London alleyway.
‘Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,’ Harry thought to himself as he made his way through the pub. ‘I will fear no evil.’
Like everything else in his life, it felt like he was muddling his way from one mess to another and he had no idea where to begin. Why was he brought back? Hell, who had the juice to bring him back? As far as Harry knew, he’d just accomplished the impossible. Getting himself reoriented into some passing form of a normal life was going to take a lot of work.
The early morning rain had lowered the profile of Diagon Alley’s customers and Harry slid through the remaining shoppers with little fanfare. His plain black robes lent him an edge of anonymity, despite how short they were or the obvious trailing threads where he’d torn out the Gryffindor red lining and House badge.
Harry took a left turn just past Gringotts and disappeared into the gloom of Knockturn Alley.
Knockturn Alley was an old place – older than Diagon Alley if rumour was to be believed. Next to dilapidated 18th century tenements sat graveyard-gardens full of tombstones so weathered the letters had worn away and overgrown greenery. A pair of standing stones formed the entranceway to a pagan church, wee gremlins and bat-winged imps leering at passer-by from their jutting arches over the streets. Stone footbridges crossed overhead, connecting stores and flats that could only be reached by Portkey, Floo or apparation. The gas-flame streetlamps were still lit this early in the morning, an amber glow lighting off the puddles in the street. Off of the main thoroughfare, the lights were lit twenty-four hours a day, most streets being too narrow and overbuilt to see daylight.
The scent of ozone, like the super-charged air after a thunderstorm, was a sure sign of the dark magic that soaked the winding alleyways and its inhabitants. Take a single step off the main street way into the dark shadows and you were on your own. Far larger than Diagon Alley, Knockturn sprawled outwards for miles; many who wandered in had remarked that after passing the first few shops at the mouth of the alley, it was like walking into another world.
And it was a world that Harry had unlimited access to.
Etched onto the soft web of skin between his left thumb and forefinger was the mark of a spider; barely an inch in length, the tattoo granted Harry access to the black markets of the United Kingdom, marking him as one of Knockturn Alley’s own. Until needed, the tattoo would lie dormant, appearing as a vague spider-shaped wound, half-lost amongst all of the other thin silvering scars on his hands. Once Harry passed the wards guarding the alleyway, the mark would come to life, flaring the jet and red of the black widow it represented.
It was also a painless way to identify who was supposed to be there and who wasn’t. Even Lucius Malfoy and many of the proclaimed “dark” purebloods stayed out of the deeper levels of Knockturn; Harry didn’t know what would await those who were unwelcome and he certainly did not want to find out.
Harry had received his mark the summer he turned sixteen from a Dealer named Julius Strome. He’d never asked why Julius Strome used a spider of all things, figuring it had something to do with the vampire’s rather grim sense of humour.
Strome had found him wandering Knockturn’s warrens, grieving and out of his mind on a rather potent cocktail of drugs. Once Harry sobered up, the vampire had appealed to his desire for revenge with a little mutual tit for tat – Harry worked for him procuring hard to get goods and services and the vampire in turn would teach him some of his more vicious tricks including a rudimentary grasp of swordsmanship. Harry’s forceful recruitment into the DoM’s Special Forces took care of the rest of his off-the-record education.
If Harry could get in contact with Strome a bit earlier this time around, he might be able to gain enough information to stay ahead of his enemies instead of cleaning up after them.
Ducking under the ivy curtain of a low-lying footbridge, Harry took off down a shortcut through the thinning streets. Rainwater gushed out of the gutters from the deluge hitting the upper-levels, water almost ankle deep in some places. Moss crawled up the walls of the snug little alleyway, bright patches of moist green dotting the stonework.
Harry popped out of the alleyway not far from Tartarus, the pub that guarded the Knockturn Alley entrance to the black markets of London. Down the small set of stairs and into the pub was a wide room with a low ceiling, the effect making it seem like he was in danger of getting squished by low hanging buttresses – somewhat nauseating if you weren’t used to it. Seventeen small tables were spread out over the place. Small animal skulls and other odds and ends hung from the ceiling and if looked close enough, you could also see the warding runes crawling over the various knickknacks that powered the wards hiding the entrance to the black markets.
This was a place that catered to several different species. Prejudice wasn’t tolerated here. Not because it was a bastion of equality, but because its patrons were likely to tear the offender limb from limb and devour the remains.
He glanced unobtrusively around the room; there was no sign of Strome amongst the teeming patrons. Dodging patrons, Harry threaded his way through the pub towards the half-hidden spiral staircase tucked to the side of the bar.
Boots rattling on the metal steps, Harry descended underground. Nine turns of the staircase left him feeling a bit light-headed when his feet finally hit stone. A wet, earthy smell permeated the cavern and the reek of stagnant water rapidly overtook Harry’s senses. The air here was icy cold in his lungs, his breath turning into white clouds of condensation, feet slipping on the damp stone despite the crosshatching grooved into the walkway to provide stability underfoot. He rounded a bend in the stone path and came to a small dock in front of a wide canal full of dark, cold liquid.
A large boat glided to halt in front of him, hardly a ripple disturbing the glass-like surface of the canal. There were no oars and save for a cloaked figure hunched over the prow with a hand on the tiller, it looked as if the boat was propelled by magic alone.
The boat drew parallel with Harry and he lightly stepped on, the boat barely rocking under his weight. Reaching into his pocket, Harry withdrew a galleon and pressed it into the figure’s hand. Harry’s fingers moved quickly, signing in the Silent One’s language the words of greeting. May the Lords of Magic smile upon you, his hands said in the ancient greeting.
The figure replied back, And also upon you, its long fingers bending in ways that implied an extra set or two of joints in the hands.
Bits of eerie blue luminescence bobbed along the surface of the water as the boat eased deeper into the waterway. The roar of voices grew and spilled over Harry, filling him with adrenaline. He remembered this, remembered the lust for adventure of his youth.
Harry stepped out of the boat onto one of the docks. He moved with ease among the swarming masses, listening to the frenzy of voices. A multitude of languages washed over him, many of which he could understand and speak instinctively through long hours of practice. There was no dividing line here; purebloods in rags could be found standing next to part-humans or halfbloods in finery, Russians next to Arabs, Mages next to even the weakest wizard, the grotesque intermingled with the rare and the beautiful. Anything and everything could be found here.
He cast out his senses searching for the familiar sensation of Strome’s magic.
The sable-haired Dealer was deep in negotiation with a customer. Harry remembered his own exchanges with Strome and pitied the old woman; the man was an absolute nightmare to barter with. But Strome was good at what he did – his network of goods and information stretched across most of Europe. Harry was grateful that Strome despised Voldemort and his ilk. He hated to think what could have happened had Tom Riddle gotten his claws into the Dealer.
The discovery of the Holly wand alerted Harry to his biggest security flaw: It didn’t matter if did or did not use the wand with an active Trace, he still showed up on everybody’s radar like a burning bush in the middle of a fucking desert.
He should have remembered his second year of Hogwarts where Dobby had used a hover charm and Accidental Magic – not the sharpest knives in the drawer – believed it to be him.
Four silver coins exchanged hands and the hag hobbled away, clutching a small bag in her gnarled hands. Strome looked up, feeling his gaze, but Harry was already moving, ghosting through the crowds. Harry slid in behind the Dealer, waiting patiently for Strome to sense him.
Strome’s nostrils flared and the vampire spun around, a sneer curling his upper lip into an expression resembling a snarl.
Harry met the vampire’s glare without fear. “Greetings Julius Strome. I hear you can be of assistance to me.”
North rapped on Shorner’s office door with his knuckles. “Sir?” he asked, unusually polite for some reason.
Shorner set aside the file he’d been struggling to get through. Some of the DoM’s early agents had less than a good grasp of writing and grammar, illegible notes and initials scribbled in the margins. “Come in,” Shorner replied, gesturing to the chair in front of the desk.
“You told me to look at the surrounding networks and see if anybody saw something unusual,” said North, juggling a thick folder stuffed with both parchment and Muggle print-outs. “I figured, what catches more stray spells and surges other than Accidental Magic?”
Shorner nodded. “What do you have for me?”
North opened the folder, careful to keep the papers inside from falling out and handed him the top sheet of parchment. “This showed up a few hours after the Veil went on the blitz. The girl who caught it didn’t know what she was doing which worked well in my favour. I managed to Obliviate her before she could send out an underage magic notice or tell her supervisor.”
“Whose is this?” Shorner asked as he glanced over the more technical aspects, a myriad of spell arrays and runes crawling across the read-out.
David North’s cool blue gaze didn’t even flicker as he gave the whole folder to Shorner. “Judging from the kind of magic your visitor-from-beyond used, I’d say he was a budding young sorcerer of the dark arts.”
Shorner flipped the non-descript manila folder open, a few scraps of parchments drifting to the floor before he could catch them. But the name on the first page of the medical exam made him suck in a startled breath despite himself.
Harry Potter, Number Four of Privet Drive in Little Whinging, Surrey.
He watched Archimedes Darrin Shorner dash out of his office with his assistant in tow, their flight stirring up a flurry of murmurs from the bullpen of desks outside the office corridor.
Shorner hadn’t locked his office. Easing the door open, the figure set his package on Shorner’s desk in the middle of his paperwork and carefully arranged the letter on top. It wasn’t the subtlest way of handling these matters – and he did not in any way agree with this – but he lacked the luxury of choice. Titania’s word was law.
The figure closed the office door behind him and walked out, Faerie magic hiding him from sight.