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Chapter Text

On a bleak night in August, the city of London momentarily paused its bustle to watch a boy die. 
His pale cheek bit the pavement, black robes sopped to soak up the red. He ruptured over the rain spattered brick, a crater formed where his brow should have been, fragmented like a hammer to dry clay. One limb lay splayed while another danced through the lines of traffic, dodged and wove around as any piece of litter cast from the highest buildings. He stroked briefly, fingers clasped tight around a piece of ivory fabric, and seized once more when the dying was permanently done. 

The fabric may have been taupe, it would become quite hard to tell once the torrential downpour had washed the majority of him down the sewer shafts. 

Bystanders would claim that he had writhed, not seized. That an arm had been picked up in the snarling teeth of a terrier; others insisted it had been a Rottweiler. That he was blue before he fell, not after, when the chill of evening had curdled his remaining skin and painted it the color of fresh breaths in spring. They would tell more fantastical lies to cover what little sparks of truth had been caught by eyes more keen than club rats and cab drivers; the latter of which would turn the damage to the bonnet of his car over to the insurance company, claiming his full coverage should repair what the act of some god had done. 

They hadn’t a clue. 

The dog had been a Pomeranian, no larger than the flapping handbag of the woman who commandeered him, tugging his leash taut when the wet of its nose met the liquid of the boy. The arm had been taken by a street sweeper, mulled into the grinding fabric that juggled beer bottles and soda cans down Shoreditch High Street. There was a fact in the way the shock had been dispersed; a hundred screams broke out at once, unable to reach a decibel high enough to mute the original rapture. That scream called on high drew others, a commotion that opened window shafts, sent girls to the fire escapes to gawk over the rails, caused cigarettes to stub and footfall to cackle through puddles and sillage. 

Inside of a pub called The Latern, another boy, not so unalike the one that soiled a cool night in August, pulled his cloak hood over the tufts of his drenched hair. Cocking his head to the rubber of his shoes, he raised his lip and turned, begrudgingly, toward the bar. 

He hated the psychedelic muggle music that crooned over the dreary walls, disliked soiling his best pair of boots, and certainly could have gone without the dramatics. 

The rain continued to pour. 

And in the underbelly of the city, where the rats scurried about corpses of lesser men, their toes painting the boards of a forgotten house with drops of crimson stench, a spindly hand raised his wand and carved a name out of a long list of those exceptionally lesser men. 

Chapter Text

             The Docklands. 1974.
                Five years earlier  

The present was a pliable thing. An ever-pervading, yet swiftly changing condition that spread its tendrils from the banks of the river Thames to the walls of fog in the west end. Nobody knew the present quite like Tommy Crane.  The present, like its homonym form, was said to be a gift. One that she had many times considered returning. Those that could unravel the future often had the wherewithal to change it. Tommy had to sit on the windowsill and watch it unfold like a paper owls wings. 

“You’ll be able to see all of what is happening in our world, but there’s little that you can do beyond that,” Enoch Ames had told her. “The pleasure of being a seer lies not within what exists in the light, but what is currently happening in the dark.” He had cocked his head. “Let us hope you have perfect vision.” 

That was in the beginning, when the cracks of London had begun to weep black down the annals of the crooked streets. A war, one that didn’t concern itself with the every day man and woman. Those with magic burned; the ones that had any survival instinct at all leapt for their lives into the ranks of the dark arts cults that had formed through the country. So much magic had been lost in a world already weak of it that the Ouroboros Order had sent task forces to the reaches of the hidden islands, stealing orphans from their beds in the dead of night, handing them wands before their twelfth birthday and stuffing them into the claustrophobic quarters of safe houses in hopes that they would live long enough to fight. A few would. 

Come away, oh human child, to the waters and the wild. 

  “I was surprised when I found you,” Enoch Ames said. “There’s not many surviving from your line. What with your predecessors slain, I thought for certain, with our luck, that you would be a talentless squib. We’ve had to dispose of those before.” 

To which Tommy had sighed, folded her arms and asked, “How does one dispose of a child?” 

Enoch hadn’t answered, and that was answer enough. Tommy was talentless in many regards, but an ability to stretch her vision to find what prisoners of war had been shackled to posts was a blessing for the Ouroboros Order. Even at that age, still pink in the cheeks with hope, she knew that she had stepped out from under primrose tufts and green bower and into the sinking pit of a war that already had too many casualties to ever constitute a win for either side. She didn’t need to be able to see the future to see that. 

Which is why she grew enamored with the concept of power. 

There were multiple types of power; the brand of it which was given, through blood and wealth, passed down the line of a family tree until it blossomed in the hold of the eldest heir. Or in some cases, was lost completely to the soft hands of an offspring too spoiled to shoulder it. The other version of power was taken. Plucked out of that tree by hardened fingers more apt to wield it. Tommy had long ago deduced that those who were born in glory did not deserve it, and in fact, were merely keeping the fruits warm for a more capable stranger to sneak in and pocket it in the night. 

She was thirteen when it occurred to her that she had hardened hands. There were tens of other children in the safe house tucked between harbors in the docklands. It was spring. Long before the blackness had completely encapsulated the city. When stars still burned overhead and the muggle radio stations were calm over static waves, insisting that the shorter days and longer nights were nothing but an astral phenomena that would pass like any other hard bout of weather. It was at the same time that the Deatheaters, the Vitruvian Cult and the Ouroboros were playing a sharp witted chess match in regards to who could muster the most soldiers. The first blow had already been dealt. The ministry, fallen into ash and rubble, had lost their game in a smoking pyre in the center of Whitechapel. 

There were few players on Enoch’s team then. Only a handful of adults and a makeshift orphanage designed to keep young minds open to concept of war. 

When Tommy spotted Oliver, that sandy haired little turnip, playing with a stick on the bank of the Thames her first consideration was that the last name Prewitt belonged to the purebloods. A surprise, considering the majority of the sacred twenty-eight had sided with the Deatheaters, leaving the Vitruvian and Ouroboros to hunt for half-blooded scraps, and veins so diluted by muggle interference that their offspring were as closely related to magic as a cat is to a mountain hare. Her second consideration was that Oliver was sort of a cunt. 

He batted the makeshift weapon against a pile of rocks first. With careful consideration, he smacked a stone as one would a golfball, and set it to hurdle into the ankle of a raven haired girl with legs half soaked in the river. The evening bell called out inside of the decrepit boat house, a cry for small ears to wander inside and take to their beds. Tommy ignored it. So did Oliver. He sent another stone through the air, which whipped the girl upside the head before sinking into the murky waters. 

“Stop it,” Tommy scolded him. The girl had begun to cry, which was both an audible nuisance and a visual annoyance. Tommy was reminded of something her mother would have said; keep crying, and I will give you something to cry about. A sentiment for those that had no regard for justice. “If you hit her again, I will come over there and drown you.” 

“You could,” Oliver replied, and he was every bit the sniveling boy that she suspected him to be, tongue to the roof of his mouth as he sneered. “And Enoch will whip you until your eyes bleed.” 

The skies were geared to pour great gouts of rain over the city. A gale pummeled Tommy’s hair over her fox-face. “Scars heal, but they won’t be able to bring you back from the dead.” 

The moment it left her lips, she felt a pang of regret in using death as an ore to wade the tide of such a simple argument. It had always been so, karmic retribution slapping a hand to her shoulder when she stooped to low threats. The summer air drew insects out of their homes in the day. When storms broke, their houses did too, and they were always in search of a new place to shack up. The hornet landed on her kneecap. A set of hollow black eyes glared up at her. Its nimble weight testing the patience of her thin skin as it fluttered toward the hem of her dress. 

Black waters mingled on the dock. Boats with rusty underbellies scratching tally marks into the wood, each hit to the weak port a notch to mark the passing minutes. Tommy’s breath was a ghost, escaping her lips in shudders. The shadow of the city splayed out on the other side of the river, hulking and gargantuan in comparison to the little beast that rested on her thigh. 

This was the downside to the present. She could see the scene so clearly, sure, but what good was that if she couldn’t deduce how the future would unfold. What exact length of time it would take for the hornet to drop it’s bodice into her flesh to scar and taint. Most children with magic had managed to escape such an earthly problem as allergies. Those that didn’t, very often had antidotes and potions at the ready from the hands of more practiced guardians. Tommy fell into a lonesome category. That killing thing which threatened her with unblinking eyes could end her short life in a fleeting moment. Face red, hands clutching her throat to stop a pain that would not cease until froth had formed at the corners of her mouth. If Enoch were not quick footed enough to make it to the dock upon hearing her screams, she would seize out in the dirt. If he was, she would at least make it to the steps before her skin turned purple and tongue swelled beyond repair. 

Tommy didn’t venture to assume that she could survive that sort of thing again. 

“Everyone knows your parents were cretins,” Oliver chided, slapping his stick in the mud. Tommy shrugged off the insult, before realizing it had not been leveled at her in the first place. “Now they’re dead, and so is your brother.” 

“Your parents are dead too!” Cried the girl, sloshing out of a rising wave. Tommy tried to recall her name. Eastern in nature, she thought. Far from the celt varieties of the Hidden Islands. 

“Yeah, and they died for the right side,” Oliver returned. Each step was a word as he waded toward her, “Not for the Deatheaters who started this war.” 

“They didn’t have a choice!” The girl screamed. 

Tommy focused her attention on the hornet, which like herself, refused to make an inch of ground. Even when the sharp thud broke the evening. Long past the point where Olivers head had gone under, a pair of nimble hands holding his body below the tide it until it seemed an impossibly long time for bubbles to keep rising. 

The hornet fluttered, only an inch. The girl went under with a tight scream, muffled by black water in her throat and arms breaking through bracken tide. 

Sinai, that was her name. Novak. 

Tommy flicked the wasp, it’s body writhed in a patch of grass some feet away. A singular dark bead in a haystack that pleaded for further attention. Her bare feet traversed the stones of the bank, metal and broken glass digging into the hardened parts of her soles. It wasn’t much compared to the pain of dissipated air in her lungs as she took to the water, as if someone had turned on a vacuum that sucked every drop of blood from her nerves and made her swim in it. 

By the time Enoch found the mess there was only two of them left. Oliver floated on his stomach some miles down the Thames, bloated by then, a carriage for birds to ride on as they picked minnows from the crags and used the soft of his neck as a dinner plate. It wasn’t a noble way to go. Then again, such noble houses rarely fell in a way that was dignified. Rather, they dried up like plums in the hot sun and waited for scavengers to pick open the seeds. 

“Who did that then?” Enoch asked, acutely aware of a missing child and two more with water poured out of their mouths like deflating vessels. He looked younger in such dim light, the moon at his back reflecting the softer proportions of his face. Men of his age rarely looked good in freckles, but he had a way of working that token of youth to his advantage. A boy soldier. A young captain of an army that lost one too many cadets. Tommy assumed he was in his early thirties. Men began to curdle beyond that. 

Sinai didn’t blink as she lay with an open palm over the soft cotton of a hand-me-down paupers dress. Hell, she might have been dead too. 

“I did,” Tommy choked. “And I would do it again.” 

Enoch lowered himself, warm fingers to her neck, knees popping as he crouched. “You helped that girl with great risk to your own life, even when she didn’t deserve it. We both know it was not for the sake of your own integrity. You’re going to have many problems in your life, Tommy Crane. I sincerely doubt that you will ever be loved. You may be adored for your lies, your willingness to do what needs to be done. Even your skills will be vied for. But, nobody will ever truly like you beyond what they think they might gain from being in your company.” He paused, pulling a cigarette from his suit pocket and lighting it with the tip of his finger. “Are you prepared for that?” 

Tommy turned her face toward the boathouse. A light had flickered on in the upper story. Three little faces gathered at the window to watch the commotion. 

“I don’t care about being loved,” she mused. 

“Good,” Enoch clapped his hands, then trailed the warmth of the cigarette down her jaw. She waited for him to press the glowing cherry to her throat, but he wavered. “Sometimes you remind me so much of your sister.” 

Tommy initially thought he meant in her foxen features. 
He likely meant, rotting. 

Chapter Text

Whitechapel, London. 
1979. 

One would be hard pressed to refer to the Ouroboros as ethical - but they certainly could have been worse. It was a upright order, at the very least. They didn’t kill mudbloods, if that was any consolation. Unlike the Deatheaters, who reveled in causing as much chaos as possible, who dragged men and women out of dens in the night, slit their throats in the name of blood supremacy and worshipped a figure so far from godly that he would more closely resemble the devil. Dually, the Ouroboros were different from the Vitruvian, who paid no mind to the cleansing of blood, but sought for the wizarding populace to rule both the muggle and magical world with the power of the light. 

The Ouroboros and the Deatheaters had one thing in common. They were intelligent enough to understand that anything worth taking had to be thieved in the dark. But, their tactics were dissimilar. Enoch Ames had long ago partnered with the heads of magical creature factions that had formed across Britain. It wouldn’t have been a shock to find a centaur sipping tea in the galley of the boathouse, a Veela’s head thrown back in laughter as she grazed a sensual finger over the rim of her cup. Tommy didn’t like the way the vampires showed up in the night, reeking of coagulated blood, stood stark against a full moon on the fire escapes. Though, she couldn’t deny they had been useful more than once. 

Perhaps, the greatest difference between the three was their choice in clothing. Black was the force that swept across England, great swaths of it that formed serpents in the sky to harken in a band of Deatheaters like a morbid parade of the  dammed. The Vitruvian wore white. 
Tommy thought emerald green was a perfectly sensible color. 

“Three minutes,” she claimed, her pale form starkly contrasted against the cloud of green essence she had erupted from in the center of Nocturne alley. “White smoke rising over Kings Cross station.” 

Sinai Novak had already disappeared, the remainder of Tommy’s sentence chasing after her as she crashed through the stained glass of Borgin and Burkes. Tommy was on the verge of giving another time estimate, but it fell moot in the closed quarters. Sinai was already holding the shopkeeper at wand point.
 “The death mask,” Tommy said, holding out a paper with the artifacts silouhette scrawled over gold leaf. 

It smelled of mildew and parchment, fear and sweat. The shopkeeper screamed, they always did. But in the end, with Sinai’s wand tip crushing his windpipe, he adjusted his spectacles and looked at the page. “I haven’t seen it in ten years. It was purchased by a private collector.” 

“Specifically?” Tommy asked. 

Terrified from gut to gleam in his eye, the shopkeeper squinted to make a recollection. He offered the crack of a laugh, and the bob of his adams apple as he choked down the truth. “I would have to check my records.” 

“I should turn you inside out like a trout and eat your entrails,” Sinai whispered into his ear. Her crimson tongue grazed his earlobe, voice low and haunting. They had ran through the proper protocol for these types of situations one hundred times over. It never mattered. The moment Sinai was in the throws of a fight, she chameleoned from morose to blood lust. Which was exactly why she made such a productive right hand. 

Further threats were muffled by the door losing its hinges all over the scuffed wood flooring. It had already been dark in the space, in alongside artifacts and tomes that cast grey shadows on the hoarders walls. The entrance of Atlan Baatar made it darker still, his green robes sashaying with hollow steps toward the counter. He took a bite of an apple that he stole from the shopkeepers basket, pearled teeth crunching down before rolling it into the pit of a vase that had been toppled over. 

“How long?” He asked, his smooth Mongolian accent echoing. 

“Thirty seconds,” Tommy returned, and winked at the shopkeeper. “We’ll be back. Do try to remember where you sent that mask. I’ll take an artifact in exchange until you have a moment to pour over those records.” 

Atlan Baatar brought his heavy hand down on the glass counter case. Tommy’s view was blocked as to how many pieces of jewelry, embossed runes and cuffs that he gleaned into the pocket of his robes. It was certainly less than what the death mask was worth. But, if nothing else, it would put a damper on the shops business until the owner was wise enough to come forward with what he knew. 

They were children no longer. No sketch of their orphaned faces remaining, no gaunt hollows of cheeks, nor nicks on their crowns from the cutting of lice. Tommy was tall, Atlan taller. What Sinai lacked in height she made up for in brute strength. She kept her dark hair pulled into braids with strings of leather. Tommy left hers straight and free flowing. If she needed to act like a fox, she might as well look like one too. 

It was their speed that made them distinguishable from one another as they broke in a flurry of shooting smoke through the shops windows. Tommy moved at the forefront, a shooting star that guided the others toward the belly of the city. Made further differentiated by the puffs of white that chased them over the Thames, from Whitechapel to Westminster, over the river and down an underground mail tunnel. Outside, in flight, the scent of mildew vanished in the night winds. London smelled of ash and rot, of looming storms and spilt oil slick. A sickening cacophony of bins left out on streets with few workers left to retrieve them. Of fumes from car exhausts mingled in gasses made of magic. The killing curse carried the scent of petrichor and salt as it ricocheted from pipes behind Tommy, spraying water down the alleys of the underground. 

For an organization that prided themselves on ethical magic, the Vitruvian were not gentle in their use of the curses. By any means necessary, was their call to action. But, it wasn’t in tune with their other mantra. Not very, we light the dark, of them. 

There were benefits to the massive waves of muggle emigration from the city. There was always somewhere empty to hide. Those that did not wish to become martyrs vanished overnight, leaving flat blocks vacant and shops with swaying ‘closed’ signs. London had lost millions to the waves of people who searched for higher ground. As Tommy broke through the window of an upper story apartment, she could caught a voice through an abandoned radio, static and spectral, a news anchor still spilling the ludicrous notion that the cause of the black fog was merely a strange weather phenomena; that the populace had nothing to fear and they should not quit their jobs to move to the countryside. The sun will shine again. 

The downside was that there were only a few million muggles left to do the menial tasks that kept a city running; repair infrastructure, boost the economy and operate trains. The tube always ran on a strange and unpredictable schedule, one that only Tommy could see with her ability to view which station the cars had pulled into at any given time. The upshot was that Tommy arrived in a train car at the exact moment that the engine pummeled a Vitruvian into sparks of white ash, and Sinai careened through the station with Atlan at her side. 

Tommy’s boots thundered down the carriage. The second Vitruvian was behind her, but he wouldn’t make a spectacle, not in front of the people that his leader was trying so hard to defend so that she could overthrow them when the time was right. Muggles leaned their heads back on the windows, white button down shirts open, dresses smattered with black from the oleaginous fog. They paid little mind to the girl who appeared in front of them seemingly out of the mist. But, did they ever? Had they one singular time, opened their eyes and saw what was happening around them? Highly doubtful. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have been there. 

She opened the door to an empty carriage, paused halfway down the aisle and produced her wand. It had been a gift. Human bone wands were hard to come by, especially a form of it so meticulously carved into a pointed tip and smattered with the etchings of ancient runes. It was the most expensive thing she owned. 

She waited until the carriage door clicked close. The Vitruvian took a step. Tommy turned. Her shoulders slumped as she raised her top lip. She hadn’t known the Vitruvian, there was no friendly rapport between the two factions that would have made her heart swell with sorrow to see him bleeding great spurts from his mouth all over the blue linoleum. Her annoyance was in the haste of it, how quickly he had fallen at the hands of a male in black garbs that had transposed out of the walls. The Deatheater gripped the white cloak of the fallen man before tossing him into an empty row. 

“I was going to do that,” she pouted. “He chased me all the way from Nocturne to the west.” 

“I saw,” The stranger claimed, voice like the death rattle gurgle of a river bed. He was young, no more than a year or two her senior, with drenched curls laid spritely over high cheekbones. Eyes bright and encircled with black coal. He reminded her of Gawain Parkinson, the only Deatheater she had ever come into vocal contact with. 

The Ouroboros had no direct affiliation with Voldemort and his band of heathens. The Deatheaters despised mudbloods and the Order was wholly composed of them. Yet, their commonalties, a use of dark magic and a shared disgust for the Vitruvian, laid their frameworks closer than any other cult. A closeness that felt like claustrophobia as the train screamed through a tunnel, metal rocking as a turn jostled compartment doors open. Tommy gripped her wand. The stranger patted his against his thigh. 

“Typically, Voldemort sends Gawain if he needs to contact us,” Tommy said. “Who the hell are you?” 

He laughed, “Gawain is dead. Didn’t you hear? Crumpled up on the East end pavement like a discarded tissue.” He turned his attention to the lifeless body in the seat. “Holding a white scrap of fabric.”

“A shame. He was tolerable.” Tommy sighed. She didn’t have a great reverence for many people, especially those on opposite spectrums of the war. Yet, Gawain had been a man made of steel, quick witted and slow tempered. He would have made a fantastic member of the Ouroboros if she had been able to sway him toward the better side. “That has to be the first Deatheater killed by a Vitruvian.” 

The stranger cracked his neck, “I’m surprised you didn’t see it happening.” 

“I wasn’t looking.” 

“Isn’t that unwise?” He asked in a mocking tone. “I figured your eyes would be trained on the enemy at all moments.” 

“I can see your friends have arrived in the wrong carriage.” The image played in the back of her mind. Two of them dampered in dark shrouds, stepping through a mass of bodies. 

He waved a flippant hand, “These damn things never run on schedule.” 

“They would if you stopped killing all of the conductors.” 

“The ouroboros do not have any more respect for muggle life than we do,” he enunciated each word, drawing out the later vowels with a hiss. “You just pretend to. That is our common ground. Let me offer you some camaraderie. Do you know Caius Avery? Big, wild eyed son of a bitch. He likes to flay girls alive.” He raised a thumb over his shoulder. “You can surely see him coming now.” 

Tommy raised her lip, chin pointed to the windows and the splotches of lantern light sopping through them. “I have one of those too.”

“It’s good to have a friend,” he smirked. “But, yours isn’t here. Mine is. I can step away from the door and let him through, or we can come to an arrangement.” 

Big and wild eyed or not, Caius wasn’t quicker than Tommy. She could see him floundering down the aisles, hips bumped on seat backs and heavy head ducked beneath the roof. They were coming up on the next station, she could be out of the car and blowing East in a puff of smoke while his ankles were still rolling up the escalator. There was, however, an intrigue in such a display. This sharp, dark, boy wanted something from her. It was always beneficial to know what the other side sought. 

“Explain,” she ordered. 

“You’re looking for the death mask,” he said matter of factly. 

Tommy shrugged, “what is that?” 

That. The only object which had ever truly mattered in the history of both mortal and wizarding creation. The genesis; the beginning, the end and all manner of existence in between. That intricate masquerade that promised immortality to the wearer, so long as they kept it tucked tight against their nose bridge. There were downsides to such an object, of course, the risk of it forming with ones own face. An inability to seek the soft respite of the afterlife. It almost certainly guaranteed hell, considering the ritual one had to commit to form it to their profile. Then again, any manner of life lived in such a world as the present was a promise of fury and flame in the underworld. As long as you couldn’t die, it didn’t really matter. 

“You don’t look stupid,” he returned, “are you stupid? Surely, even orphanages have books. Did they not teach you to read? You know what it is, and I know you’re looking for it.” 

“Why would Enoch want the death mask?” She asked, softly pouting her lips. 

“I never said anything about Enoch Ames.” 

The air tightened, a gust of wind billowing through the open doors. A mother and child stepped from the platform into the carriage, before quickly deciding another car might be safer. Tommy attributed that to the scent of lavender and smoke on the Deatheater. It certainly wasn’t her. She had worn her most sensible dress. The next station was two minutes away and the doors were closing with a rusted screech. Caius had come to the window behind the stranger, only his tawny chin visible from beneath a cloak hood. 

“Say what you want,” Tommy ordered. 

“I’ll help you find it,” he whispered. “I know where it is.” 

Tommy laughed, “If you actually knew where it was, you wouldn’t bother approaching me without it in hand.” 

He nodded singularly, “Fine. I have a general idea of where it is. I’ll bring you to it, as close as I can muster. In exchange, you do something for me. We need an end to this years long battle. The Vitruvian have grown far too powerful. It would make a much simpler fight if it were only the two of us waging blows. Vittra Nylan has to die.” 

Tommy scoffed, “You want me to kill the most well protected woman in the world in exchange for the slight possibility that you aren’t lying to me? That doesn’t sound like a deal at all.” 

“It’s the only deal you’re going to get,” he said, and stepped down the alley. From a closer proximity the lavender on his skin was choking, mingled with the finer elements of citric whiskey and french vanilla. “Shall we shake on it?” 

The door propped open, Caius meandered into the first row of seats to check the pulse on the dead Vitruvian. Behind him, another male centered himself in the aisle. The station doors opened, the newcomers cloak blew off of his head. Tommy felt a pang of stark familiarity that she could not place. 

She reached out her hand, fingertips nearly grazing the strangers. Then, she pulled them back ever so slightly. “What’s your name?” 

“Regulus Black,” he claimed. 

Tommy stood on a street corner in the East end and listened to a yard full of dogs bark at the sinking moon before Regulus’s vacant hand had the time to fall at his side. 

Chapter Text

The boathouse had once been a decrepit shack used as a sanctuary for birds nests and excess chains. In a lot of ways it still resembled the original, worn wood falling into decay from years of river water seeping into the foundation. If one were ever lost, they could easily find the Ouroboros headquarters by scent alone; that of rotting fish and stagnant puddles. The door was almost always jammed by rust, and if it wasn’t, it was being held closed by a mechanism that mirrored a muggle bolt lock but could only be opened through recognition. 

Tommy jostled the bronze knocker of a snake swallowing its own tail. When it wouldn’t give, she leaned in to peer through a hole in the frame. A bloodshot amber iris glanced back at her, blinked, and the lock flicked open. 

Inside, the walls were thrice the size in height and twice that in width. Enoch Ames hadn’t skimped on the interior decoration. Tomes and sculptures lined the walls. Tommy passed a bust of a fractured Grindewald on the mantle place, dusting his nose with the tip of her finger. A Cornish pixie had made a nest in the highest bookshelf through the theft of Sinai’s leather hair bands and a discarded box of biscuits. There was more rolled parchment than any mortal could read in a lifetime, and half as many travel manifests spread out over the dark wooded furniture. It was a dim space, crawling with the memories of long dead men, and girls who had often wished that they were dead; and spirits of those who got their wish. The Ouroboros were not a wealthy order, unlike the Deatheaters who won their financing through the pillaging of vaults. Tommy’s makeshift family was a poor one, but hell, at least they were also unhappy. 

“You’re alive,” Sinai said, her feet on the long dining room table and bandages down the ankles. It sounded almost defeated; on the verge of accepting the alternative. But the longer Sinai’s eyes drew over Tommy, the more it dawned on her that she had actually been worried. “I was going to send Atlan to look for you.” 

“Deatheaters on the underground,” Tommy replied, the velveteen of her voice mingling with the wind blown drapes. 

In her minds eye she watched the boys, even now, pummeling over London in fits of smoke. They paused momentarily to gain composure in Leicester Square, cloaks billowed on the foot of the art history museum. Regulus, Caius, and the outlier. She had been watching the unnamed one quite closely since leaving the train. The impossibility of his features; even his buzzed hair seemed thickly waved in what was left of it, honey colored eyes and a birthmark over his temple. She didn’t know him, but she had a distinct feeling that she knew someone quite close to that description. 

Sinai blinked her honey colored eyes, thrummed a knuckle on the wood, and returned to bandaging her wounds. “What the hell do they want?” 

“It was the youngest Black offspring mostly. He wanted to strike a deal. It was painfully obvious that he had nothing solid to give us in exchange, but at least I know his name now. I can follow them until they pass a veil ,” Tommy huffed, “what did you do to your feet?” 

“Dogs,” Sinai said, “lost my footing in the wrong garden.”

Tommy nodded and leaned her head into the doorframe, “Gawain Parkinson is dead.” 

Sinai’s eyes shot up once more, and trailed over Tommy as if she expected her to evaporate at any moment. She sighed, “He was tolerable.”

“That’s what I said. The Black boy is the worst of them, I can see it in his eyes. I wouldn’t be surprised if Voldemort were priming him for some higher position, if he hasn’t attained it already.” 

“That family is loyal,” Sinai whispered. 

Tommy sneered and pulled a notebook from her cloak pocket. The pages had been pilled down to almost nothing, ink smears disguising notes taken as far back as her thirteenth year. Most of it had been recopied into other journals, but she preferred to carry the master copy on her person. She flipped through until she came to the list of known Vitruvians and their attributes. With the sharp of her wand pointed to the page, she burned out what she had to assume were the two that had lost their lives on the train. Then, she moved onto the Deatheaters, a line through Gawain Parkinson, a question mark beside Regulus Black. Scanning the text, she came up short on any clue as to who the third could be. It would have been much simpler to write him off as a Lestrange cousin or Nott nephew. 

“Tell me about your family,” she demanded , holding the notebook open as she surveyed Sinai over the binding. 

“In five years, you have never asked me a single question about my bloodline,” Sinai chortled, “I figured you had that information locked away in your big throbbing brain, or at least filed in a cabinet somewhere.” 

“I do,” Tommy replied, “Ancient pureblood line from the Slovak aristocracy. One of the last houses to join, fought alongside Grindewald until his dying breath. Your grandmother disowned your father after he shacked up with a muggle born. I’m asking, specifically, what they were like.” 

Sinai’s eyes went glassy as she peered through the open window. Night, true night, had fallen with a chill to spite August. “I don’t remember.” She turned her attention back to Tommy. “Does it matter? You’re what I have for family now.” 

Tommy flicked the notebook closed, “Lucky you.” 

“Lucky me,” Sinai rolled her eyes so hard the whites were fully visible. “May I be excused of your pleasant company? I’m exhausted.”

The Huntress and the Alchemist couldn’t have been more different- The skills that Sinai owned from birth were of bloodshed and steel. Tommy had received another basket entirely. She plotted, she weaved, she made men into gold and removed the ‘im’ from possibility, especially when it came to the subject of living forever. At the base of the rounding staircase, she wiped a finger over the bannister and checked it for ash. There wasn’t any smoke rising in that house, which was a good sign, despite the fire eyed creature cross legged on the table. 

“Tommy?” Sinai called after her. 

“Sinai,” she answered. 

“You didn’t say what Regulus was bargaining? What have they got?” 

Tommy turned her attention to the rafters. Thumps shook the floorboards in the upper story, someone else was about despite the late hour. “A means to an end, if they have anything at all. Though, like I said, I sincerely doubt it,” and continued up the stairs. 

One can remove children from orphanages and call it a home, but if you stock high walls to the brim with orphans, it simply becomes a halfway house. The headquarters had once been so full of children that it became hard to step without squishing one. At least thirty of them, half as many adults. Then there were a handful of adults and a bushel of children. When that number dwindled down to five narrowed eyed youths, the adults had mostly been picked off in one way or another, or had left for safer pastures. Thus, there was Enoch, and his handful of bastards. 

Near the window in a boarding room, the twins sat cross legged on the floor slipping a marble back and forth to each other. Their sleeping shorts and shirtless torsos crumpled over under dirty white socks. Arkady and Dmitri Kallizov were much too old for games, but they were also inherently creepy to be in the company of, so marbles was a perfect alternative to haunting the house with screeches and displays of magic that would have constituted a stay in Azkaban if the prison was still open. 

The boarding dorms were wide and harrowing rooms with sterile beds lined up in perfect rows, adorned with scratchy cotton sheets and brass hardware. When the house was full, Tommy had to fight for a cot near the window. Now, she had an entire room to herself. The first order of business had been burning those sheets and replacing them with the unicorn hair threads from the guest rooms. The second order of business had been installing a lock. She picked it with her pinky nail, aware of the key having gone missing some weeks ago. It would have been just as easy to pry it open with magic, but some habits died screaming. 

Halfway into the room, eyes locked on the cushioned bed and coffee pot bubbling on the fireplace, she turned, flicked the lock, and started further down the hall. 

A chill crept in through the stained glass windows, specifically, from an angel missing her eye in the center of a depiction. Enoch wasn’t naturally religious, but one wouldn’t be able to tell on decor alone. Tommy figured he had gotten the idea to spread catholic ornamentation throughout the house in order to remind the children that their time on this earth was finite and fleeting. Constant reminders of mortality only served to rally Tommy against the construct. 

No, Enoch was not a Godly man, but he kept a cross above his bed. That, and a floating chandelier with one too few bulbs that casted amber shadows over the otherwise pitch black room. He was sleeping when she entered, undisturbed by her nimble feet on the creaky boards and the hitch in her breath as she approached the mass below the quilts. 

When Tommy had first met Enoch she was struck by his sharp features. If one were not careful they could slip and cut themselves on the man. Even then, he looked sharp, possibly even more so, only in the wrong places. His collarbones had sunk in from the lack of sustenance. It was sometimes so difficult to convince a starving man to eat, and even though the house elf had his bedside did her due diligence, he only suck further into an emaciated version of the titan he had once been. He reminded Tommy of a bird, strong nose jutting out from the hem of his blankets, plume feathers for lashes and darting pupils beneath his purple eyelids. 

“He’s getting worse,” Tommy deduced. 

The house elf nodded, she didn’t speak, she might not have owned a tongue. The creatures that came across the Vitruvian were often missing all their parts, and Thimble was likely no exception. 

The elf didn’t make a fuss as she squeezed a sponge into a bucket of ice water and rubbed it across Enoch’s forehead. Tommy was chilled from viewing the ice roll around in the bucket, but she also didn’t have a fever that was eating her away from the inside. 

“Leave us, Thimble,” she said. “Don’t let him keep you from your sleep.” 

Once the door had clicked behind the elf, Tommy pulled up the lounge chair from the corner of the room and relaxed her feet on the bed beside Enoch. He didn’t acknowledge her presence, but that was no surprise. He hadn’t done so in a fortnight; hadn’t left that bed in six months. 

“You’re going to die and leave me here to clean up your mess aren’t you?” She asked, and the precipice of a sob rose in her throat. She swallowed it down. When was the last time she had cried? Maybe, when her sister died. It was difficult to decipher when the grief had come and reared, all those little deaths blurred together. 

The hollow air avoided giving her an answer. 

Tommy leaned forward, cupped Enoch’s hand, and composed her best threat. “If you go before I find it, I will follow you into hell and make you regret stealing me from my bed.” 

Enoch wasn’t a father, wasn’t a brother, or even an uncle. He was hardly a caretaker. There were times that Tommy wished him dead with every ounce of her might, and times that he almost killed her for wishing it. Enoch wasn’t a lot of things, but most importantly, he was. He was the man that didn’t leave her on the river bank, the father that stopped whipping her when he found that her pain was mostly self inflicted anyway, the brother that kept the door to her room jammed when men entered the house, and the friend, that wasn’t much of a friend at all, but at least he had purchased her a piano for her fourteenth birthday. Not a simple piano, a flat back monstrosity with keys the color of onyx and rubies inlaid to reverberate the sound. Sometimes, when Tommy lay in bed and the ceiling began to close down on her, she would play the piano from twenty feet away. Every note crawled across her fingertips as the keys dropped at the mercy of an invisible thread of magic that tied her to the instrument. When she was especially stressed- it was a pipe organ, long timbering notes called out on high as if to coax martyrs from their crypts and call saint to mass. 

Tommy played the piano at the bedside, a finger pressing into the worn pads of Enoch’s inner palm. Three doors down a pipe organ played. 

 “You’re a son of a bitch,” she said. 

Atlan entered then, because when one of the bastards grieved it seemed to slip through the cracks in the floorboards and alert all of the others. He laid his large hand across her shoulder and sighed. They sat in silence; the Alchemist, the Architect and the Hierophant. Three hearts beat until the space grew confined with longing. Stars danced about through the windowpanes and the chandelier appeared to grow dimmer by the moment. 

“Leave him,” Atlan huffed. 

Tommy had the nerve to, but as she pulled away, the gentlest of squeezes pressed down on her white knuckle grip. 

Chapter Text

There was a definite list of things that Tommy Crane did not want to wake up to in the wee hours of the morning. That list included but was certainly not limited to, fires or loss of limb, a spider in her bed, or a spectral in the corner of her room. Somewhere near the top of that list, tucked neatly below a flood and high above an atomic bomb, was Dmitri Kallizov.

Thankfully, by the time Dmitri crept into the room's shadows to lounge with his feet up on her coffee table, Tommy had already filled that table with two empty cups. She then took a shower and brewed a third carafe. She lay across the floor, books at her sides, front, and toes, their pages spread wide to showcase anatomy, artifacts, and poetry in various forms. When hunting down an ancient relic, such as the death mask, fictional literature was hardly necessary. But what good would a mind be if one did not go to the lengths of broadening it?

Tommy had known Dmitri for three years and ten days, and she knew that certain discomforts were part and parcel of that relationship. Notably, she often expected his crooked mouth to open and pour obscenities all over the bedroom floor before breakfast. Or, worse, stretch the hem of his white tee shirt, light a cigarette with the stoked flames of the hearth, and start speaking of ghosts that inhabited the rafters. The latter was only problematic when he sighed gusts of smoke at her with the window closed.

Arkady, the elder of the Kallizov twins, was the only person in the house who ever had an idea of how to handle Dmitri. An idea that he rarely exercised. Tommy had only seen Arkady truly admonish his brother on one occasion, and the fallout of that argument had lasted for a peaceful three months. It was unlikely that he would ever do it again. Those sorts of miracles were fleeting things that one had to grab once in a lifetime. Any further action would have been diminishing at best and catastrophic at worst.

They were both headstrong creatures with stronger cheekbones and weaker appetites. Arkady was tall and thin from throat to heel in a limber way, making him appear half tree branch. Dmitri was thin like a snake. They were handsome, in a chilling way. As if Satan, cast down upon the earth, had split in two upon impact.

“Does our queen allow council?” Dmitri asked after a long oration on salt to keep ghosts at bay. He lowered himself to the floor beside Tommy and flicked ash over an open copy of an alchemic text. “I am a wise man, you know.”

“I’m not sure why they always write wise men into fables,” Tommy replied. She also wasn’t sure that Dmitri was one. “I’ve never read of a true king that let anyone speak.”

Dmitri smirked, which looked cannibalistic in the dim light. “But you’ll let me speak because I have something to say.”

“Then speak it then,” she ordered.

Dmitri cleared his throat, rapt his knuckles on the hardwood, and took an excruciatingly long moment to form his words. “You’re looking for the death mask in an ocean of artifacts. How does one find a needle in a haystack?”

“That is a riddle, not council,” Tommy rolled her eyes.

“Sometimes they’re the same thing,” he whispered. His mouth was so close to hers that she could smell the peppermint on his breath, muted only by the tobacco that billowed between his index and pointer fingers.

Tommy considered what the answer to such a question could be. Perhaps Dmitri was the wise one. Between the early hour and the anguish of a sleepless night, she thought only of coffee and headaches. “They hire someone to look for them?” She asked, then closed her eyes to his narrowed gaze. “We don’t have that sort of money in the coffers.”

“Wrong,” he snapped. “They turn out the lights but keep the shine on it.”

Dmitri looked lost in madness, more so than usual. His flaxen hair had grown curly and wild about his cheekbones which aided in accentuating his hollow eyes. The Kallizovs had been the last boys standing at Durmstrang once the Deatheaters had picked the school apart. Their final days on the property were spent in a version of the Triwizard tournament that sought to judge how far a man was willing to go to keep himself alive. Arkady had been spared the torment, but Dmitri was named champion and fought some weeks in a makeshift hedge ring with students and adults alike. According to the records in Enoch’s locked cabinet, Dmitri had won the games by snapping the neck of an older participant with his bare hands before disfiguring his eye socket on the sharp edge of a boulder. He had only spoken of it once, which was to say, he looked at me funny.

There was no doubt that the Ouroboros house was haunted. But a significant number of Dmitri’s ghosts lived only in his mind.

“Needles are reflective,” Tommy nodded, “It would shine under a flashlight. The death mask is made of obsidian. Does such blackness catch the light?”

Dmitri smiled, “What’s the darkest place you can think of? I’m speaking literally this time.”

Tommy mulled it over, “The bottom of the sea.”

He grasped for her hand on the hardwood, taking it in his and placing it on the concave of his chest. “The heart of a man.”

“That’s still figurative, not literal.”

“Is it?”

She pulled her hand back, “You’re not helping me at all. Only twisting me in circles. What do you even propose? I go about flirting my way through the wizarding world until I stumble across the mask in some man's bed?”

“The masks men wear to get women into bed are usually less intricately crafted,” he shrugged, “I heard your Crane call cawing through the boards last night. Regulus Black offered it to you, didn’t he?”

Tommy looked away, as far over his shoulder as her eyes would adjust. “You’re an eavesdropper.”

“And smarter than Sinai,” he retorted. “Kill the light.” And this time, Tommy knew he truly was being figurative. The light, the Vitruvian. “And use your charm to shine on that boys Black heart.”

“You hate the Deatheaters more than anyone,” she returned. “Why now of all times to convince me to make a ceasefire with them? If the Vitruvian fall, it is only us against them with no buffer.”

Dmitri raised a brow, “Maybe I am more than ready for that confrontation.”

A gale blew at the drapes, flickering the candlelight until the room was half made of dark. Dmitri didn’t break his stare, but Tommy lowered her gaze altogether. She had thought about Regulus’s proposition while sitting next to Enoch half of the night and listening to him take great gasps of air to ease the rattle in his lungs. It was risky. It was too risky to waste time on if it didn’t yield anything, and that was only if she succeeded in achieving the one thing that so many had tried before. The Vitruvians were hard to kill, especially the leader of the pack. Light magic wielders, sure, but they didn’t shy away from brutal uses of their hands.

“No,” she settled on. “There will be another way.”

Dmitri narrowed his eyes, pouted lips ready to burst with further insanities and riddles. Then, he pulled back, retrieved another cigarette from the waistband of his shorts, and held it taut between his teeth. The tip sparked as he took a long drag. “Of course you will. You’re the smartest among us. It was only a suggestion. If anyone is to achieve what seems lost, it is you.”

He was the wise man, and Tommy was the king at his grasp having hubris breathed down her throat. Only she didn’t feel very inflated. She waited for him to say something, then regretted giving him the time to do so.

“Do you fuck Atlan?” He asked, “He’s always following you around like a puppy.”

“Of course not,” she raised her top lip. Her patience had worn down to its second joint. She closed the book her arm was resting on and leaned closer to him. “I’m done with this conversation.”

“I didn’t mean offense,” he mocked her with an eye roll. “Well, if not him, then my door is always open.”

“Get out,” she ordered.

Dmitri smirked, rose to his feet, and trailed toward the door. At the cusp, he rapt his knuckles on the frame and turned to her again. “There’s a vampire in the kitchen.”

“And how long has he been there?” She shot back.

Dmitri rocked his head back and forth, “an hour before I came in here.”

Tommy huffed and pulled herself into a stance. Of course, there was a vampire in the kitchen. Likely annoyed and volatile at the near break of the day. The morning was not yet full enough of inconveniences. It needed more piled on until the seams were ready to bust.

“Where is Arkady?” She asked. Sinai and Atlan were certainly still asleep. At least she might hold out hope that the other Kallizov had intervened in some way.

Dmitri laughed, “What am I? The fucking brother keeper?”

The vampire in the parlor had never known boyhood. Indubitably, all grown men have been a child at one point. A babe wrapped in their mother's grasp and swaddled to the point of growing blue in the face. Raised on milk and honey, weaned from days spent in the dirt and rolling about the orchard wood. It was a promise that kept Tommy standing tall in front of the men she was burdened to be in the company of. All of them at one time had cried out from their cribs, grasped their hands in search of some swollen comfort, and then proceeded to bawl themselves silly when they weren’t offered such a prize. She could rest easy knowing that despite their large stature, on the inside, they were weeping for the swaddle.

That was the problem with the vampire. She doubted anyone could have ever wrapped him in cotton and caressed his fussy bones.

Artemi, she thought his name was or a Greek derivative, anyway. However, his accent was French, as were the ruffles that surrounded the cuffs of his coat. Even vampires had been human for some time, but that didn’t mean they had childhoods. He had been born during the medieval period if his general disposition and choice of ornate leather bootstraps were any inclination. The scars of long bled sores on his clavicle were a giveaway of the black plague. Now, if there were points in history where a man could have skipped childhood altogether, the days of sweeping fevers over French hillsides certainly made that list.

This vampire had traded in the surety of death for the pleasure of everlasting life. All that was required of him now was bleeding carcasses until their veins snapped from the empty tension. It wasn’t the brand of immortality that Tommy was keen to find. What served certain princes was death for the paupers. She didn’t mind death. It was simply the way they went about it.

Tommy watched Artemi cross his ruffle-clad arms on the lounge sofa and wondered what another human blood tasted like. “You’ve been waiting long. It is almost day break. I will ensure the inconvenience does not happen again.” She wasn’t going to apologize. Every time she uttered the words, I’m sorry, it felt like taking a brick out of the house's walls. Enough apologies, and the whole edifice would crumble.

“Where is Enoch?” He asked, dropping all of the vowels. “We come to visit, he does not answer. He sends the child serpent again and again. Has he died?”

Tommy brushed off the insult of child serpent. It was a name preferable to bastard orphan, at the very least.

Artemi himself had never set foot in the house, but it was not uncommon to find other members of his coven standing acrid in the doorway. The vampires worked the forests surrounding London, tearing apart any members of the Vitruvian or Deatheater cults that they could find. In return, Enoch promised them seats in his new version of the ministry whenever that dream came to fruition. This was against Tommy’s council, she might add. The vampires were loyal only to themselves, even when they pretended to be noble mercenaries.

Tommy crossed her hands and sighed. “He has gone to Scotland for a business venture.”

“I don’t think that’s true.”

“What reason do I have to lie?” She pressed, “I have admitted to you that we are having trouble keeping organized in his absence. Once he returns, he will meet with you in the flesh and sort out any grievances you might have.”

Artemi chortled, “my grievances are many.”

“Then let this child serpent be of assistance,” Tommy leaned forward, elbows on her thighs.

He craned his neck toward the window and licked his teeth as if he had tasted something unpleasant. “When did you say Enoch would return?”

“When he is finished with his work.”

“And how long will that take?”

“You’re guess is as good as mine. Do those in your coven with titles below your station press you on such matters? It is not my duty to question him.”

Artemi chuckled, “Those below my station would never be left in the darkness on such matters. It seems to me that you know nothing at all.”

In Tommy’s peripheral, she caught Sinai leaning against the kitchen's doorframe. She was still wearing her satin robe, hair braided up in an intricate bun and clasped at the frays with a leather strap. Sinai scraped the tip of her index nail on the wood. Tommy eyed her momentarily and returned her gaze to Artemi.

“You must run a tight ship,” she said. “Impressive. That is why we revere your friendship so very much.”

To this, Artemi spat on the floor. “My camaraderie means nothing to Enoch and will not sit and have it mocked by his petulant bastard daughter.” He stood, robes sashaying and eyes wild. “We are not yours to toy about.”

“I would never imply such.”

It was certainly the plague that had killed him the first time. Artemi’s throat still wore the purple bruises of a trachea that had coughed up too much blood to ever pale. The closer he moved, the easier it was to spot the splotches of black that resided between his fingers and made homes of the crooks in his knuckles. The ones whose skin took lilac never lived. Nor, did the ones who toiled in the gravediggers pits, stacking bodies atop bodies until they were a mishmash of skeleton and puss. His clothes said aristocracy, a seigneur even, but those garbs were almost certainly stolen. This was a paupers son given the gift of a second go round.

How could someone live on having seen so much death? Tommy thought of Dmitri caving a boy's skull in with a rock.

“We’ve taken a better deal,” Artemi said, quite matter of factly. He was close enough that Tommy could smell the rot in his throat.

“There are no better deals,” she shot back, only partially of her fingers digging into the soft velvet of the lounge chair. “The Vitruvian will cut out your tongue and the Deatheaters will only make you false promises.”

He ran his tongue over his sharpened canines as he placed one hand on the lounge chair and the other near the soft skin of Tommy’s throat. “I still have a tongue.”

Tommy dropped her eyes to his piercing gaze to fiddle with the hem of her dress. Hornets crawled across the floor and landed on her thigh. They burrowed in her flesh and made waxen cells of her muscle membrane. They flittered in her lungs, laying eggs in the soft tissue until every breath she took was accompanied by a larva crawling out of her sinus cavity.

She blinked, and the hornets were gone. They were never there, really, but weren’t they? Wasn’t death hanging inches from her face with beady blackened eyes and an itch to drain her body of life?

There was a crack in the corner of the room. Perhaps, lightning had struck the dining room table. The candles went out, anyway, because when Tommy closed her eyes there was no dim amber glow sneaking through her paper thin lids. It had begun to rain inside the house; she was wet, and the water tasted like copper and woodland as it slipped into the corners of her mouth.

Artemi slumped into her lap, his heavy head racking against the lounge before she tossed the rest of his body onto the floor to disintegrate between the boards into a pile of ash and crumpled satin. It was the exact location that he had spat minutes prior. The only proof he existed were the accumulated droplets of saliva and a ruby emblem that had adorned his robes.

Tommy wiped her mouth; she knew better than to swallow any of that blood accidentally.

Sinai stood over her, a sentinel against the sun that slipped through the curtains; no storm, only Sinai. Those two things were possibly mutually exclusive to one another. She held the edge of the doorframe in her white knuckle grip, the end of which had been thrust into Artemi’s back and had snapped off in the cavity where his heart was supposed to be.

“I shouldn’t have made you do that,” Tommy said.

It wasn’t an apology.

“I wanted to,” Sinai rasped. “But, if you ever put yourself in a situation like that again, I will kill you myself and save you the trouble of having your head severed and sucked dry, do you understand me?”

It was an empty threat. Words were wielded from a mouth that truly wanted to whisper sweeter ones, to check if Tommy was alright, to ask after any injuries, and to settle her into bed with a smile and a cup of tea. Sinai would have said a lot of kinder things if she were capable of doing so. Yet, all Tommy could think about was the lingering smell of a storm that had never come to pass, the stake in Sinai’s grasp, and the excruciating feeling that some debt had suddenly been settled between them.

Tommy checked Sinai’s eyes for a flicker of regret or a memory long past. She found only pride.

“The Vitruvian has the coven,” Sinai said. “Are we fucked?”

Tommy stood and reached for the ruby emblem, toying its sharpened edges around in her grasp. “I need to go somewhere.”

“You need a shower,” Sinai ordered. It was as close as she was going to get to maternal.

“Tell Dmitri to turn off all of the lights.”

Chapter Text

The Deatheaters had spent so much time in the city's lower depths that they had declared themselves lords of the runoff and damp. There was a sky beneath the world. Its stars twinkled in neon on the precipice of the doorways, exit signs of taverns, and falsely lit entrances that turned into sweeping meeting rooms and chambers below the sacred houses; lights so dim that they had to be double-checked to ensure they were not cracks in the roof that allowed the headlamps of cars streaking through the city to shine in. Despite the light's synthetic nature, if one clamped their eyes near to shut, they could make out constellations formed on the ceilings.

There was Gemini on the rotted wood of the Leaky Cauldrons doorway. Sagittarius swept his bow over the ceiling of the Nott residence, a twinkle in his eye as he watched a woman being dragged by her hair and thrown into a locked broom closet. She would cry out as if the apple had been on her head when the great archer let his bow fly. Unaware that the stories of heroes and great men were not spoken beneath the ground. The arrow that struck her was Crucio, and she would find comfort in his silent brother, Imperio.

“Silence now,” A stomach-churning voice boomed through the ether. And silence there was.

Leo led the way to the grate that was most easily accessible to the outside world. The stars Formosa and Moriah stood watch as three figures took the form of smoke and ash, hammering through the iron bars and out into the city. It was Regulus’s preferred exit—as he could send one singular glance back toward the constellation that held his namesake, a constant opportunity to say goodbye to himself.

A girl with hair of flame stood on the bustling street corner of Leicester Square. Well, she was half there, anyway. The rest of her was in a waft of emerald that concealed the back half of her body and the edges of her form. She wore a white dress that had taken some severe spillage to it. Crimson coated her high cheeks, dotted the freckles on her nose, and lay passive in the cracks of her clavicle like puddles of reddened ichor. She was impressive in her concealment; great swaths of people milled past her with grocery bags swinging and eyes set toward the nearest operating watering hole. Regulus could not outright tell if her eyes were green or blue, hazel or a brand of darkness that was more akin to the absence of light rather than the appearance of black. When she blinked, they were opaque and then red. That was what it looked like when she watched enemies in her mind's eye.

It was not much fun to pin her up against the cobbled stone. Her chest hardly emitted a huff as he pressed the cold of his hand into the ice of her shoulder blade. She was expecting an attack, which took the enjoyment out of doing so.

Regulus grasped her hand in his, squeezing at her frail knuckles to roll the balls of them about like playing marbles. She did not cry out from the pain. A shame; the previous days had held far too little enjoyment.

“This time,” he spoke, “I’m not letting your hand fall before I can shake it.”

Tommy Crane gripped back. She wasn’t strong, but her conviction was there. Regulus Black enjoyed women. Some might even argue that he enjoyed them at an alarmingly fast rate. He liked fighting beside women, even fighting with them. He liked to hear them sigh and toss their hair over their collarbones; he liked the nectar in their voices that turned to sap when he sent them away. He even enjoyed it when they argued with him. However, that was mostly due to the fact that Regulus simply enjoyed all forms of argument.

He didn’t like this one. She was made of barbed wire and bleach, and her voice stung like gravel rubbed into an opened wound. Her eyes were green.

“Terms have changed,” she whispered. “I won’t play the assassin while you relax on silken pillows. You’ll help me kill Vittra, and then you’ll give me the mask.”

Regulus sneered, “What’s stopping me from killing her myself and keeping the mask?”

“One, you don’t have it yet,” she spat, “and two, if you thought you could get to her yourself, you wouldn’t have approached me in the first place. This brings me to my third point: there will be a temporary truce. Whatever plan you have of sending me on a wild goose chase away from the Ouroboros so that you can infiltrate and slaughter the rest of us in the night, cast it aside.”

Regulus did not cast it aside. It hadn’t exactly been his consideration in the first place, but he enjoyed the idea. Perhaps he did like her. She talked of treachery with such a smooth cadence.

“Are you stupid or mute?” She asked, clutching his hand. “Agree or don’t.”

He didn’t like her.
“What about my additional terms?”

“You don’t get any extras.”

Regulus made a mock pout, “That’s not much of a deal. What if I come up with something that also benefits you?”

“Then I would call you a liar, as this settlement is already verging on too good to be true,” she huffed back. Her torso pressed against his chest as she did. She was much taller than she had looked on the train, more fleshed out and limber. Still, he dwarfed her by half a foot and could have crushed her fingers like a roll of foil.

Regulus argued, “What part of this deal keeps my own safe? We’ve established your end of the truce, but how am I to know that you will not send your own after me once we are high in the mountains looking for light? There are vampires out there, and they belong to your Enoch.”

There was a brief flicker in Tommy’s eyes. Her breath hitched so shallow that he wouldn’t have been able to catch it if he hadn’t locked his own gaze on her soft throat.

“Oh,” he mused and flicked the index of his free hand over the blood that had coagulated on her chin. She still smelled like lavender beneath the tinge of rot. “I hope you didn’t swallow any of that.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, but seemed on the verge of spitting from the memory. “Who’s to say this isn’t the blood of one of your friends? Maybe I wanted one last go at the Deatheaters before I made the deal.”

Regulus smiled, “I know what all of their blood smells like.” And he did, as he had spent the last five years spilling it over friendly scuffles and markedly less friendly punishments.

“So what do you want?” She bit at him, pearly teeth gnashing inches from his jawline.

“Now that I know we’ll be safe from vampires, my ask is that I should be able to call on you for one last agreement when the time is right,” he mouthed the words slowly, aware that Caius Avery and Lucia Mulciber had made their way down the darkened street and well into earshot. “With no questions.”

“Too bold, too vague,” she said. “No chance.”

“Trust me, you’ll want to agree. Think of it as a parting gift for poor dead Gawain.”

“Even Gawain didn’t have my trust. I’ll give you this. When this time comes, ask me. Then you’ll receive an answer.”

Regulus didn’t enjoy hearing Gawain’s name on her poisoned tongue. He should not have brought the fallen boy up in the first place. He had already forbidden the others in his troupe to speak it. Every time the name Gawain was uttered, he imagined what the crack of a sternum against the oil-slicked cement would feel like.

He cut his eyes to the wall behind her and then back to her pouted lips. “A truce then. With such minor stipulations.”

“Truce,” she mouthed.

He shook her hand and dropped it before her scent lingered on his cloak. She was on the verge of dissaparating. He thought of doing so himself. The Deatheaters did not fare well above the ground. The city was made of darkness and smoke, which worked well enough for concealment. However, muggles packed into a living corridor had a stench about them. They milled past, eyes locked on some unseen goal that he could not measure. They worked and toiled despite the end of the world, wholly unaware that there was another world entirely out of the corner of their unblinking gaze; they rummaged around in their pockets for coins to pay parking meters and cashier clerks. They never bothered to save a cent to pay the ferryman who would usher them into the underworld when it all came crashing down. Spiteful, clueless little creatures that hardly opened their lids to see truly, let alone closed them to think truly.

It made him sick or angry. Either way, his stomach turned as a man bumped his shoulder and spun around to check the placid air for an invisible entity he had walked into. The man saw only smoke. Perhaps he had even caught the cerulean tint of two iced-over eyes peering at him from beyond a veil too thick to traverse. He kept walking.

“We leave tomorrow,” Regulus said. Do not bring anyone, and do not tell them where you are going. We will meet at St. Paul's, first bell. Don’t be late.”

“You’re not bringing anyone either, then?” Tommy narrowed her eyes. “It would be a poor show of character to trap me into traveling alone amongst evil men.”

Regulus turned to peer over his shoulder at the evil men in question. Caius flittered a blade between his fingers, the sheen of it catching the moon's light that hung like pearl bone above them. It was a shocking gesture. Typically, he carried a much larger weapon. Caius wasn’t noble in his torture, only in his words. Regulus had never met a man who spoke of honor and virtue so highly while simultaneously carving flesh from muscle. He was some reincarnated knight of a god-forsaken kingdom who had lost the majority of its men to famine and war. With that being said, every time Caius opened his mouth, it was actually his father that seemed to speak.

He stayed silent, but his fingers spoke as they rubbed the dull edge of the knife.

Regulus then turned to his other compatriot. “I will be alone. But, for the record, Mulciber is not a man,” he lowered his voice to Tommy. “She is a bit evil, though.”

Lucia didn’t drop her cloak hood, but Regulus could smell the citric perfume in her hair as it wafted beneath the dark fabric. If Tommy could see her, she would call Lucia beautiful. Regulus didn’t know the heir of the Ouroboros well, but he knew she was the type of person who appreciated powerful things. Lucia didn’t require a knife or a sneer to be taken seriously.

“Where’s the other one?” Tommy asked. She pressed against Regulus. Her eyes roamed curiously over the troupe.

“You’ll have to be more specific.”

“The one with the honey-colored eyes from the train,” Tommy whispered. Then, she sharply decreased her wonder, her gaze downturned.

Regulus blew air through his nose, “how romantic. Do you have a crush on him?”

“He looked familiar,” she returned. “What’s his name?”

“I don’t peer longingly into my comrade's eyes. I would have to get back to you on that,” he returned. His mood had suddenly soured. The smog above ground had brought on a headache.

The street quieted enough to hear each passers footsteps as if they were an anvil. Regulus didn’t sleep through the nights and would stay awake through this one. An impromptu venture out of the city would need some disguising. He considered how to word his departure and how best to sneak through the grate system without a peep of it falling back into Voldemort's ears or, worse, his father's. Caius would come up with an excuse for him. He had gotten quite adept at filling Gawain’s shoes.

Regulus turned his attention to the rainfall, which puddled like ink between the cement and roadway. The water runoff smelled like blood. He imagined the puddles warped into the form of a boy.

“Tomorrow then, alone,” Tommy nodded.

Only then did he recognize how tightly his hold on her wrist had grown. She would feel that tomorrow. He relaxed and braced his lips to reply, but she had already fled. Tendrils of emerald smoked down the rolling roofs and spires of the black city. Its shadow cast on the highest building like a cursed comet raining down omens. Tommy Crane was certainly an augury. He had known that upon meeting her the first time.

He wasn’t at all comforted by her promises. Nor was he shocked that she had ordered more from him than she was willing to give. He supposed it didn’t matter much. Her odds of living through the upcoming ordeal were low.

“What are you gawking at?” He asked, spinning on his heel to find the other two with their eyes locked on the circumvented skies. “Focus. There are miles to go before we sleep.”

It was something his father would have said.

Chapter Text

// thank you for reading this far. From this point and into the rest of the story I feel the need to reiterate the horror themes, violence, gore and uncomfortable scenarios since not everyone is always mindful of the tags. Love you! Hope you enjoy!

The boathouse was a home built for leaving. 

That much was evident by how easily it capsized in on itself. Two Ouroboros held their wands out straight. Wisps of white light surrounded the edifice, then it was gone. Four walls and countless windows, the rickety porch and the broken chairs that it adorned it. All condensed down into the belly of a stolen pocket watch on a gilded chain. One of the many souvenirs from holding up Borgin and Burkes.

There would be no more coming and going from that place, not for the time being. Enoch and Thimble the house elf would be safely tucked into the pocket of Arkady Kallizov’s jacket. Food, medicine, magic, anything they would need, now no larger than twelve roman numerals on an ivory face. 

The rocks on the the rivers edge took a hammering that sounded like hoofbeats on dry land. Off in the distance, a car radio paused its bass for an interval to let a dog howl at the watching moon. The whole scene sent a flitter through Tommy’s stomach that she eased by digging her pinky nail into the flesh of her wrist. 

It was better this way, safer. There was no other option now. 

The early morning had begun on a sour note. Enoch hadn’t been conscious. But, even through his sleeping moans and covered lids, Tommy could sense displeasure on him. If he were lucid he would have referred to his new predicament as a prison. Equally, if he were lucid then Tommy and Dmitri wouldn’t have had to wrestle Atlan out of the house. Enoch would have seen the sense in it, somewhere deep down in his black heart, and ordered the boy out himself. 

There weren’t more than twenty words spoken between the five Ourobos in the hours leading up to their departure for St. Pauls. Atlan had cursed a few times, which Sinai mirrored in more flavorful language. Arkady mumbled death threats under his breath, not only toward the Deatheater that had yet to show his face on the steps of the cathedral, but also toward the birds, passing cars and his brother. Really, he was aiming at any target that threatened to move. Dmitri smoked a cigarette on the rafter of the church and told, and re-told, some nonsensical and poorly translated Bulgarian proverb about a fox and a hare. In a shocking twist of events, he was the only one that showed a semblance of sense on the situation. 

Nobody else was pleased, least of all Tommy. She had made the order to pack their things and they followed, because that is what they did. They hated her for it, because that was human nature. She could either spend her morning staring up at the darkened clouds and forming pleads for forgiveness, or she could govern. There was no middle ground. Tommy governed. 

Regardless of how adept Tommy considered herself with a wand, there was no world where she could take down Vittra alone. They needed the mask, which required one womans death. All five of them would have to make a sacrifice for it. 

“You lied,” Regulus said as he apparated onto the highest steps of the monstrous church. His face blended with the ivory marble for a moment. Though, there was no mistaking him for holy. 

“So did you,” Tommy returned, tilting her head toward the three Deatheaters at his back. It would be disingenuous to say she was happy to see him. However, he was the only person that had addressed her directly in the previous twelve hours and she appreciated his forthcoming nature. 

“I brought them because I saw you bring yours,” he smirked. 

“Bullshit,” she shot back, “I watched you all fly out of that tunnel in Camden and come straight here. You had absolutely no intention of arriving alone.” 

“You caught me,” he conceded with a wide smile, taking the steps two at a time. “I had a premonition that you would betray me.” 

Tommy rolled her eyes, “premonition is too weighted of a word to throw around before sunrise.” 

The galley moved in toward the base of the stairway, save for Dmitri would kept put on the roof. Regulus dragged his eyes over the Ouroboros, seemingly realizing that he was still outnumbered by one, and scowled. Tommy did the same to the three extra Deatheaters, though they were very close to even. Caius Avery was so tall he technically counted as two people. 

“This is Regulus black,” Tommy said to her members. 

At the same moment, Regulus had opened his mouth to say, “you all know Tommy Crane.” 

The two heads stared at each other in equal annoyance. A laugh broke out from the heavens. Tommy couldn’t tell if it was God or Dmitri. 

“If I may-“ Regulus started. 

Tommy lifted her hand in a mock gesture to let him speak. 

Regulus cleared his throat, “For the time being, there will be no in-fighting between us. In turn, you will not make allies of yourselves. Though, I strongly doubt that would ever happen. Still, don’t fucking kill each other until this is done. We’ve had enough messes to clean up.” He motioned to the Ouroboros, “Unless they try to kill you. Then, you know, fucking have at them. Rip their spines out if you must.”

Tommy raised her brow. He seemed to be done speaking, but she figured he would at least add a more appropriate final word. He did not. 

She shook her head, “well, since you’ve put it so eloquently.” 

“I’m a man of few words.” 
His left eye twitched when he lied. That was a valuable tell for Tommy to catch. 

She addressed her own camarades in a whisper, “just try not to release them of their limbs until this over.”

Arkady breathed through his nose and pointed to Caius on the steps. “How about half of a limb? That big cunt surely doesn’t need his full wingspan.” 

Caius cackled, thumbing at the object in his pocket that was either a wand or a dagger. “You used to play quidditch for Durmstrang. I remember watching you flail on the field like a broken winged dove. Have your reflexes improved?” 

“Mine certainly have,” The voice came from over Caius’s shoulder. 
Dmitri had dropped from the roof and ambushed him. The Bulgarian placed a quick kiss on Caius’s cheek and disapparated to the base of the steps before his attack was even fully realized. 
Caius seemed to consider chasing him, but held his stance at Regulus’s disapproving glare. He wiped his cheek instead. It was going to be an exceptionally long mission. 

“What’s your plan then?” Sinai asked, crossing her arms. 

The question was aimed at Regulus, but it seemed to land on everyone in equal measure. Tommy slumped her shoulders. 

“There will only be two chariots,” he sneered. “We’ll have to squeeze.” 

The carriages were reined by the dead and their equally deceased equines. A corpse sat at the helm of each trace, their sockets and muscle fiber largely hidden by the same velveteen fabric that lined the roofs and seats of the coach. There was no denying they had been thoroughly in the ground some hours prior. The scent of rot had left their shrouds, but the earthy grit that lined their bones still wafted in the morning breeze. The horses jerked to a halt rather than slowed; their hoofbeats little more than dull thuds on the concrete. Their shoes sparked against the cobble, completely worn down by years of tread. It couldn’t hurt them to run for long periods, the beasts hadn’t felt a thing for some time. Still, a natural instinct pervaded; Tommy watched the lead horse chew on an invisible bit, its lower jaw knocking sharp teeth against palate plate. 

The trains never ran on schedule, but this was an excessive alternative. 

Tommy swiped a finger over the muzzle of the lead horse and checked her finger pad for dust. 

The female Deatheater, Lucia, reached into her cloak pocket to procure two coins. She flipped them into the skeletal hands of the coach drivers. They didn’t have lips, but the frontrunner seemed to smile. 

“Will these carry us all the way to Scotland?” Tommy asked Regulus as the others reluctantly found their places inside. A six seater cart for each faction. At least that was a benefit. 

Regulus rocked his head back and forth, “They would, if thats where we were going.” 

“Everyone knows that the Vitruvian’s hideout is somewhere in the Hebrides,” Tommy scoffed, “I figured we would get as close as possible until we were able to narrow the exact location down.” 

Regulus furrowed his brow, “Can you truly not see her with your little trick?” 

Tommy turned her gaze toward the cathedral. A gargoyle had landed on the spire, shaking rock unto the earth. The sun hadn’t shone in London for years, but like the vampires, the creatures still feared the possibility of daylight seeping through. 

“I’ve tried,” she sighed, “My sight only leads me far enough to see them flying over the Isle of Skye. After that, they seem to have a very powerful veil in place.” 

“Gross negligence on your part,” he rolled his eyes. “You’re looking on the wrong country. A group of them have taken up shack in Paris. I suspect Vittra will attend the Delavore’s ball. She’ll be masked, of course. You’ll be able to sniff her out.” 

“I wouldn’t be capable of seeing her exact location without knowing her face. What if she never arrives? The best I could do then is track down her closest associates.”

Regulus raised a hand to the towering church. “What’s the saying? Build it and they will come?” He then turned his attention to the carriages. Lucia had begun to board, her hand in the doorway. He quick flitted his wand to snap the carriage shut before she could make a full entrance, a lock of her curly hair severed and floated to the damp ground. “You and Avery ride with the serpents, Crane and I will need to have discussions on this long haul.” 

Tommy cut her eyes to the Ouroboros carriage. Sinai had yet to board. Tommy motioned her to the Deatheaters coach. There was no way in hell she was taking a parade through half of the country without one of her own close by. 

“Where are your bags?” Regulus asked in an accusatory tone. 

“We pack light,” she returned.

He eyed the teardrop necklace around her throat as if it were the only thing she was wearing. “Let’s hope you have a ball gown up your sleeve.” 

The only remaining soul in their allotted compartment was the unnamed Deatheater that sulked by the window. He lifted his largely concealed gaze as Sinai shifted into the seat across from him. Though, only long enough to take her in and turn away. Tommy paused on the steps, risking a look toward where Atlan Baatar had stuck his torso through the door of the other carriage to watch her board. She wanted desperately to call all of them over for one last word, despite his scowl. Not to mention, the scowls of those she could not see through the rotted wooden boards but knew were plastered on their faces. 

Nothing would happen. She would see them in France as long as Dmitri kept his insults to a minimum. Then again, more foolish women had hoped for more less impossible things. 

She gripped Regulus’s arm as he came in behind her, turning on her heel to properly catch his eye. Beneath the soft sleeve, his skin contracted. He was a lean boy, but made of muscle and ire. “I will slaughter you in your sleep like a Christmas lamb if this is a trap.” 

“Interesting,” Regulus smirked, “I was thinking the same thing.” He made a motion with his spare hand as if he were wringing the throat of a small creature. “I do prefer goose, though.” 

The hours passed quickly. Well, as quickly as time feels below water. Every moment a gnashing fight to return to the surface. Nonetheless, time moved with the tick of the second hand on Regulus’s gleaming wristwatch. He had abandoned his cloak on the coach floor and crumpled it into a pile with his foot. Tommy and Sinai had also discarded their covers. All of that breathing in a confined space demanded it. 

The figure by the window, however, kept his shrouds pressed tightly to his cheekbones. Tommy previously suspected that he had fallen asleep somewhere around Dover. Yet, his eyes would flicker open momentarily. The honey of his irises spanned the carriage, then closed again. Silent as a mouse. Unmoving as a marble sculpture. He was certainly the boy from the train. 

Regulus referred to him as Sebastian. That was almost certainly not his real name. Tommy would have pulled the notebook from her pocket and cross checked the list of known Deatheaters for a Sebastian, but she didn’t need to. There were few things about this world that one could consider airtight. That list was one of them. They were all liars. But why? 

She thought about it through the hum of Regulus’s deep sighs that worked on an interval of twenty minutes. He was quiet otherwise, no hint of the ‘discussions’ that he had referred to as the reason they needed to share a carriage. He merely wanted to keep an eye on her at all times like a falcon tracks a hare. That was fine with her. And she suspected, perfectly acceptable to Sinai. They were doing the very same. 

Foul considerations crept in with each bump in the road. Through the rattle of the coach wheels, Tommy could make out the exasperated clinks of the drivers ribcage against the column. After an uncomfortably large rivet in the mud, she thought he might have lost a skeletal limb. Something clanged against the undercarriage and cracked. There was no way to tell. The windows had been covered and Sebastian didn’t seem keen on the prospect of opening them. They kept moving. 

“Comment est ton français?” How is your french? Regulus asked with a sneer.

“Mieux que la tien,” Tommy returned. Better than yours. 

“It’s le, not la,” he corrected her. “Le tien.” 

Tommy leaned back in her seat and closed her eyes. 

Sinai mumbled her first word since leaving London, “Connard.” 

Her accent didn’t need to be pristine. He seemed to get the point. 

When Tommy opened her eyes they were as near to the ocean as she had been in years. Though, the hidden islands were on the other side of the country. A rocky acreage of lands that sat undisturbed near Ballycastle. It was difficult to recall any striking landmarks about the place. If she thought hard enough, she could smell the cold fog rolling in over the tufts of watergrass. Far off in the distance, a loon cried melancholia. That was really it. The bulk of her childhood memories had been washed out with the tides. She pictured her sister screaming, open mouthed and writhing, in order to see the kitchen door propped open and the blood that trailed down to the coastal taverns. She imagined her mother in a heap on the porch to spot the sky broken to allow the occasional beam to shine through. Those memories were always there. Even when the surrounding scenery had been disjointed and abandoned. At least the bleakness had worked to cement some part of the island in her mind. 

On some days, she could swear the whole scene had played out on the banks of the Thames right across from the boathouse. That there had been no oyster carcasses to pluck from the sand and make necklaces of. Nor, children running barefoot in the wind until the chilled waters bit at their ankles and sent them hollering up the dock. Only the city and the blackness it was made of. 

She remembered the first time she had met Enoch. He was wearing a emerald rose on his breast, eyes wide with youth and not at all fevered. That was home. 

You were having horrible dreams, he had whispered. 

Tommy opened her eyes at another jolt of the coach. Home was in Arkady Kallizov’s cloak pocket. Both versions of it, the literal and figurative, were separated by wooden wall and four rotting wheels. 

Sinai gasped, and then held her breath to disguise it. Tommy followed her gaze to the window. 

Sebastian thumbed the underside of the velvet curtain with his head rested against it. Each movement of his finger spread a tendril of light through the cabin. He noticed their gawking and paused. 

“Is that?” Tommy asked. 

“Sunlight,” Sinai finished. “Real sun.” 

Tommy stood, nearly bumping her head against the low wall. “Tell the driver to stop,” she ordered toward Regulus. 

“Absolutely not,” he said. “We’re running behind schedule as it is.” 

Her eyes widened, and she felt like a scolded child for the first time in a very long time. She didn’t care. She would kick and bite if she had to; deny her dinner and break her toys if necessary. She opened the door. Light flooded in like beams of powdery cotton. There was still an overcast gray about the treetops, but a valley had come illuminated on the other side of the road. She had half a mind to dive out and roll. 

“Please, cease,” she said to the driver. 

He turned to her, cocked his fragmented skull, and kept moving. 

“Tell him to stop!” she demanded, tucking her head back under the roof. 

“Are you not going to say please?” Regulus placed a palm to his chest, “you said please to him.” 

They stared at each other for a full moment before Tommy sunk back into the seat with her arms crossed. 

Regulus rolled his eyes, stood, and tapped his knuckles on the roof. 

Caius Avery was the first to exit the secondary vehicle. He stomped through the packed mud on the roadside. With shoulders slumped and chest heaving, he burst through the clearing and into the tree line. Lucia towed behind him, slowly at first, her eyes locked only on Regulus. When she picked up speed it was a dead run. Tommy didn’t know what the conversations in that coach had been like. Evidently, not very positive. Arkady threw them a rude hand gesture as he plodded down the stairs. 

Atlan appeared to be in a pleasant mood. He smiled as the sun graced his high temples, rolling his neck back to catch every ounce of light on the lengths of his wavy dark hair. 

The first sun in five years did them all well. For a moment, they were children once more. Tall grass up to their knees, calendula whispering in the soft wind as it broke tangerine petals over their brows. The barbed wire fence that separated road from clearing had been damaged some time ago, welcoming them into the home of primrose tufts and butterflies with wings so white they seemed to carry the clouds on their shoulders. Poppies fell victim to their steps, producing a scent in the air that was so fragrant it almost stung. 

Halfway into the field, an insect landed on Tommy’s cheekbone. Lead thin legs pressed into her skin. She jerked, brushed it off and nearly lost her footing in the process. It was only a grasshopper. Perfectly round eyes stared at her from the sprout of a tall thistle. Green eyes, far from onyx. 

“He forgives you,” a voice whispered to her right. Sebastians accent was thick with dropped vowels. Tommy was unsure of the origin, and shocked to hear him speak at all. 

She peered back down at the grasshopper she had mistaken for a wasp. He did appear forgiving. 

Through the flowers and near the woods, the band broke off in chunks. Arkady and Dmitri dropped to the earth and closed their eyes. Sinai and Atlan plucked clods of mud and launched them at each other in a game that appeared both jovial and painful. 

It was difficult for Tommy to keep the bugs from landing on her. They hopped and played around her crown and shoulders, thoughts small and unmeasured. After multiple attempts at gentle swats that only seemed to egg them on, she abandoned the field for the trees. 

Quiet. 

Cracks of sunlight broke through the bower and illuminated hoof marks on a worn down path. Centaurs, possibly, or merely wild horses. Someone made a home of these sweet woods. A living home. So heavy with oak that the sap had stolen life from a multitude of little critters to immortalize them in the beads of brown resin. Murk and damp filled the air as leftover rain droplets cascaded down to break over stumps and root. 

Tommy turned a corner at a dense Holly tree and very nearly broke Regulus’s chin open with her forehead. 

He pressed a finger to his lips and pointed. A group of will-o-the-wisps lay dormant on a patch of bark. Amorphous blobs of white energy. They slept, dreamed and cooed with the hum of the magic that seeped through the interconnected root system of the trees. 

Tommy reached her finger out, not near enough to touch them. Her only intention was to feel the lightness they were composed of. A group of them awoke, breaking free from the bark to flow in the air in perfect swimming synchronicity. 

Regulus swatted the air as they flew toward him. He looked exactly as she had in the field. Wide eyed and nervous. A will-o landed on Tommy, it’s softness braced the bridge of her nose. The others crawled down the Deatheater until it looked as if he had fallen ill with a version of the pox. Tommy laughed without meaning to. She raised her hand and calmed his swatting arms before she knew what she was doing. 

The moment he stopped fighting the creatures, they took flight again. Only this time, they paused above his head in the shape of a crown. 

“I think they love you,” Tommy said. 

Regulus watched them with a dull sullenness, eyes toward the leafy canopies, mind somewhere else entirely. He snapped back into the present with a blink. “They don’t have their own minds. They’re incapable of singular thought, let alone love.” 

Tommy realized her hand was still on his arm and pulled away. The sun had fried her brain in such a short time. 

It had grown too quiet. The sort of pregnant silence that allowed a scream to carry for miles. When that scream did break loose it was feminine and gargled, followed by a heaving retch. 

Tommy’s eyes whitened to see where Sinai stood. She was in the clearing, sun on her cheeks, a clot of mud on her brow. Notably, perfectly fine. 

“Who?” Regulus asked, lip turned upward. 

“Must be Lucia,” Tommy answered. She had only gotten the ‘L’ out before Regulus tore through the foliage. 

Lucia stood in another clearing with her back to a pit. She shook, but hadn’t sustained any injuries. Caius braced her with a cold hand to her shoulder, lip curled as if she were making a fool of herself. One did not have to wonder what had sent her into such a state. The smell alone could curdle milk and pull curses from nuns lips. Rot, acrid, sickeningly sweet. There was a multitude of ways to describe the breakdown of a human body. Whoever had thrown the victims into the dirt had skimped on using lime to cover their tracks. 

Tommy counted thirty before she had to turn away. There were certainly more than that. The pit was large enough to house a lorry and no space had been left unfilled. Limbs had been torn from torso on a number of them. They floated in their own blood and fluids, too much of it to fully soak into the earth. A femur near the top had been touched by sunlight, bleached at the nubs. It looked identical to Tommy’s wand. Dried muscle where the runes should be. The flies were the worst part of it all. She found no guilt in swatting each and every one that crawled on her arms. Wasps were attracted to decomposition too. 

“There’s children..” Lucia whispered. 

Adults as well. Men and women of all walks of life. It wasn’t possible to say if the bodies were muggle or otherwise. Which bothered Tommy more than anything. They all looked the same in death. 

Regulus appeared to have a similar thought. That is, if a man of such apathy was capable of empathetic considerations. He cocked his head, lip upturned, and said, “it’s all just meat, isn’t it?” 

“That one’s missing a shoe,” Caius remarked toward a man in a church suit. 

“They’re missing a lot of things,” Tommy huffed. “I’ll go out on a limb here and assume this wasn’t your peoples work?” 

“Was that meant to be a pun?” Caius asked. 

“I’m glad you can find humor in this,” Tommy shot back. 

“Vitruvian,” Regulus said, and pointed to a disembodied hand near the bank. It was clutching the the torn fabric of a white robe. “We should keep moving, no more stops.” 

The boys sulked back into the treeline without so much as a look over their shoulders toward Lucia. She was still retching, tears down her face from the heave of her abdomen. Tommy considered trying to console her. That idea was immediately shot down. Lucia looked at her as if she were the next body to be kicked into the hell pit before plodding after the rest of her party. 

Tommy turned back to the mass. She wasn’t sure how to leave them. A prayer might do, if she knew any. Though, she doubted any of them would hear it. This wasn’t the sort of place that a soul would choose to stay in. 

A figure moved from the opposite end of the woods. Tommy reached for her wand and pointed it at Sebastian. He didn’t even notice. She lowered it, and he dropped to his knees above the stench and carnage. His hand reached down to grasp that of a smaller body. A child. Her blonde hair tucked back into a set of Dutch braids. Tommy made to scream at him about diseases, maggots, bacteria and worse. Something told her to remain silent. 

Sebastian leaned in and placed a kiss on the little girls hand. It was such a gentle gesture she was certain she had imagined it. He was a Deatheater, and like the rest, had little consideration for life and what came after. It was too difficult to sit with, too human. She turned away. 

Unlike the others, she had to spare a look over her shoulder before entering the woods. 

A single glance back to watch a little girl with dutch braids crawl up the bank of the pit. 

Chapter Text

Gawain Parkinson had been born in one of these small villages that sprinkled the English countryside. Regulus couldn’t recall the name of it. Something-town, or, whatever-ton. A place with a summer fair and a statue of Apollo kissing Daphne in the center of it. Packed to the brims with family owned supermarkets and local fruit stands; mercantiles and children who sat in houses their fathers-fathers-father had built with bare hands and sweat. Sleeping on quilts that their mothers-mothers-mother had managed to keep from fraying by her sharp needle and sharper love alone. 

Regulus knew all of this, because he had visited Autumnton or Springsville some years ago.  It was the first break from Hogwarts before the war had started. A summer that had already smelled like sulfur and salt, although the first blow hadn’t been cast. In October, the school and alleyways would seep dark matter, and the factions would bleed great gouts of young people into the streets to fight for their masters. The ministry would fall. One would have better luck finding a four leaf clover than an Auror who hadn’t handed in their honor and skipped town. But first, their was June. A manor on a hill. An apple orchard. Two young men and a dog with a red collar. 

It hadn’t been the best school holiday of Regulus’s life. If he were being generous, he would say the Parkinsons were overly conservative. Even his own parents had allowed him to drink wine at dinner or smoke a cigar in the parlor. Anyway, Regulus wasn’t the generous type. The Parkinsons were puritan bastards with noses so far up Voldemort it was amazing that they could find breath. 

He hadn’t truly wanted to go to the English countryside. Sirius, his elder brother, had been allowed to spend a week with the Potter family. (Shocking, considering that the Black’s father would have already known by then what was to come). Regulus had felt spurned by this. He pouted and whined until Orion Black agreed to allow him spend the summer with a friend as well. Regulus chose Gawain because the Avery’s lived in London, which wasn’t much of an adventure, and Lucia’s parents had demanded she spend the break with her nose in the next terms books. 

So, Regulus ventured South. He sipped cherry lemonade and played croquet. He wandered in the woods with Gawain and the salivating dog. He had a half-ok time. Then, he went back to his own home at 12 Grimmauld Place.

Sirius didn’t come back after a week. 
He didn’t return in a month. 
October stole the sun. 
A year came and went. 

Regulus killed for the first time the following summer. Nobody told him that bodies seize before rigor mortis kicks in, that the smell is almost immediate and the blow is completely irreversible. 

Gawain had slapped a hand on his shoulder and whispered, “You don’t have to, ever again. We’ll find a way out.” 

He had said it because he was still good, then. Still good, even when Regulus turned sour and violent; his blood tart and foreign to himself. Gawain was kind when Caius picked up a knife and never put it down again. Gracious, when Lucia started wearing her ochre curls over her face because it masked the fact that her eyes had lost all of their light. Sebastian was the last to arrive into the fold, only six months before Gawain’s end. The two of them had grown closer than any of them, despite the short time. Shared humanity, or something. Whatever it was, Regulus no longer had it. 

Then, Gawain had to go and die. 
His blood washed down a drainage grate, while his femur rattled in the hold of a street-sweepers bristles. His mother buried a hand and a few ounces of salvaged skin wrapped up in a cloak. 

Regulus tried to be kinder, for a time. He made an attempt at grace, at forgiveness and raising a gentle hand. If only for the memory of the boy. He didn’t kill, he didn’t curse, he held Lucia’s hand when she cried, and was soft in sending her away when she kissed him for it. 

It was the worst week of his life. 

The smell of rot permeated the coach. 

Not the tangible scent, but the memory of it. Corpse flesh had rummaged into Regulus’s olfactory system and nested there. Even the rubbing alcohol tinged perfume that thrummed from the women’s necks in rhythm with their sleepy heartbeats couldn’t mask what the death pit had given them. 

The first time he met Crane, she smelled like calendula. The second time, it had been lavender. The longer he sat in a heavy aired box with her, the easier it was to pull out the finer notes on her flesh. It was actually Sinai that was herbaceous. The dark haired girl with the softly broken nose rubbed an oil on the foxes temples. Carefully, quietly, making no effort to wake the little beast who’s head had fallen into her lap.  
 
“Are you dosing her up?” Regulus asked. 

Sinai sneered. She had perfect teeth. “Of course not. Do you drug your compatriots? Is that why they follow you?” 

He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “Only when they’ve been very good boys.” 

She let her head drop against the seat, eyes rolling to the roof before closing. “One day, your mouth will get you killed.” 

Regulus made to form a stinging comment, but held it back at the brush of his lips. It would only fall on deaf ears. Instead, he mumbled, “You mother her too much.” 

“Men like you always bastardize the gentle,” she muttered back. “That’s another thing that will get you killed.” 

“Any more fortunes you’d like to share?” 

“I’m no seer, but I do offer advice. Stay awake while you can,” she pouted her lips on the cusp of a dream. “Someones going to put you to sleep for good soon.” 

Then she slept.

Regulus awoke from a nightmare. Fire had licked his flesh from heel to torso. A band of human sized maggots with hands for eyes had set him ablaze in his childhood bed. They taunted him with a hot poker from the hearth before shoving it down his throat. When he opened his lids, he still felt quite hot. 

Sebastian, Sinai and Crane were dozing soundly. At some point they had crossed the English channel. The carriages would have simply pummeled through the tides, water lapping at the door and seagulls picking off whatever matter was still left in the drivers sockets. It was likely what had triggered the nightmare. The minds internal strive for the opposite. 

They were on dry land now. French soil beneath them, Amiens sun above. It flickered through the window in beams of muted tangerine, casting side long shadows on the velvet walls. It would be gone soon, a day come and went with little to show for it. They should have apparated. Though, that would have only gotten them so far. The only place he could pull from his memory bank was the house in Le Havre where Sirius had broken his wrist crawling up a stack of hay bales. 

He wasn’t bored. His mind could run for miles. It was the quiet that did it. Every rivet in the road was both a blessing and a curse. On one hand it offered a break in the hum of breathing and sighs. On the other, he was too fucking tall for such confines and kept racking his head on the boards. 

Crane wasn’t sleeping, only pretending. On occasion, her eyes would flutter open, blood red like comets streaking across the freckles on her nose bridge. She blinked, then opened them wide. Green. 

“How far?” She asked. 

“Hour or two,” he muttered. “Where did you go, just then?” 

“I don’t want to tell you,” she sighed. 

Regulus furrowed his brow, “Do you think I will laugh?” 

“I know you will.” 

“I won’t.” 

She crinkled he nose. “There’s a pub in Camden called The Kings Head. It’s always empty. It’s the only place in the city that still plays decent music.” 

Regulus laughed. 

“You’re a prick,” she rubbed a knuckle under her eye and pulled herself off of the other sleeping girl to sit up straight. 

“You have that power and you use it to sit in a muggle pub and listen to music? It seems like a waste. I know it must drain you to use it.” 

“It does,” she snipped, “So does your company. I choose my battles.” 

Regulus bit at his cheek. “How does it work, exactly?” 

Crane traced a finger on the door handle of the carriage, checking it for dust before wiping it on the hem of the dress that made her look like a forest nymph. “I can only see specific places if I have been there before. Though, I haven’t been many places. London is easy, can be canvased in a blink. People are harder. A name will do in some cases, a face and a name is even better. Specific objects are simple if I have touched them, less so if not.” 

“Did you see me?” He asked, nothing shy of curiosity. He had never liked the idea of another person having eyes on him at all times. Not since he had heard through the grapevine of what she could do, and especially, not now. “Before we met? Did you watch?” 

It was her turn to laugh, “you were nothing more than a faceless, nameless, black tuft in my peripheral before you made yourself known to me. Don’t flatter yourself. I was after more important things.” 

He leaned back in the seat, “And now? Will you close your eyes and sneak into my bedroom at night?” 

“Is that some fantasy of yours?” 

“I’m not one for being voyeured.” 

She huffed, “And I am not a voyeur.” 

“Are you sure? You stare at Sebastian quite heavily. So, it’s his chamber you’ll be watching? I’ll inform him to wear his good silks to bed from here on out.” 

Crane reached across Sinai and grasped for the window curtain. After a long gaze into the rows of wheat that grew for centuries and into millennia across the northern border towns, she let it go. Her lower lip fell, displeased that they hadn’t managed to brace the city. Not even close. 

“You’re working on my nerves.” She grazed a look over Sebastian, his cloak, the corners of his eyes that were allowed to peek out from under the dark mask. “I shouldn’t ask, it will only egg you on. But, I would like to know where you found him. He’s.. odd.” 

“Voldemort pulled him out of the same place he retrieves all of his broken birds.” 

“Hell,” Tommy said, quite matter of factly. 

“Correct.” Regulus smiled. In some foreign universe where the stars had aligned just so, he might have been able to tolerate her. That would have to be a world where she was not her. Not sworn to an enemy faction and dripping in contempt and snarled vowels. 

 “Straight out of the furnace and into the lions mouth.” 

He wasn’t in a tolerating mood. “It seems to me like Enoch has severely missed an opportunity to hone your magic. If I were him, I would have gallivanted you across the world, made you touch every object and see every face worth note. Then, tied you up in the basement to make a living library of you. Have you spitting out the news of our world like a gargled radio.” 

Crane blinked slowly, ever so slightly nudging toward the door. “You’re so vile.”

“Lighten up,” Regulus rolled his eyes. “I don’t even have a basement.” 

“You live underground,” she muttered. 

Regulus raised his brows and nodded, “Touchè. I suppose I could make it work.” 

If any soul in either coach had fallen into sleep with the brushstroke of midnight, they had certainly awoken to the crack of wheels on a felled tree. 

Regulus knocked three times on the roof of the carriage, signaling to the driver to press on. The horses lulled. A faint sound like air huffed through bare ribs echoed through the planks. The driver reined them. They did not move. 

“Are we stuck?” Sinai asked, hands braced against her knees. She was a wild tempered girl. Each word had to be hissed rather than spoken. 

“Seems so,” Regulus sighed. 
He stood and braced the doorway. A thicket of dead grass greeted him at the precipice of the steps. If he teetered further through the cabin he would find himself in the throws of hypothermia. They had paused on a bridge; one that didn’t appear strong enough for any amount of weight, let alone, the ton of it that rocked the rope with each sway of a warm wind. 

“Press on,” he ordered the driver. 

The response came in the form of a spindly skeletal finger pointing through the black. Regulus risked his life and limbs to perch upon the steps for a clearer view. There was nothing. Only darkness and the dead. Since he was quite accustomed to both of those things, he waved an eager hand forward. They needed to cross before the planks gave out. Whatever sat on the other side could be handled in time. Likely, nothing more than a fox or passing matagot. The humanoid beasts were rampant in the Northern French countryside, but solitary animals. 

“I hope you all can swim,” He muttered, dropping back into the seat. 

Crane huffed, “I take it that we should feel some concern for our safety at the moment?” 

“Very perceptive, Crane,” Regulus ran a finger over one pocket, and then the other. Wand and dagger. One typically worked when the other failed. “You might keep an eye on the other coach until they get to the other side.” 

Crane’s eyes reddened. She was gone for some time, breath shallowed and cheeks gaunt. Her hand bounced in rhythm to the sway of the bridge. Regulus assessed the pattern. Index to knee when the rope creaked. The tilt of her pointer as the carriage wheels caught on a desecrated plank. She had dug her pinky nail so far into her flesh that blood seemed inevitable. 

Regulus extinguished his lungs as her eyes opened and the road evened. 

“They’re across,” she mouthed. 

All was silent save for the Northern wind. Regulus looked to his left, toward the boxy window that separated their gooseflesh from the wilds. The skitter of paws, an animal in the brush. A fox like howl, nothing more. Volpus on hunt for hare. The coach picked up speed until the clop of hooves had fallen into their usual pattern. 

“I can’t wait to be out of this fucking thing,” Sinai sighed. 

Sebastians hand flew forward to grasp her hair as the window cracked. A motion that savored a second longer would have ended in Sinai’s head being forced through the jagged glass. She regained her composure with pace, casting the avada through the window, seemingly at nothing, with her hand rather than a wand. An impressive skill. He would have to try that sometime. 

But now, the vertigo. A familiar sense of dread; of intestines tightened around the stomach until it coursed on the edge of popping. Natural instinct called him to hold on. But, all beings know when it will all come crumbling down despite their grip. 

Regulus’s head racked the ceiling. He was up, then over. A leg below him. An arm at his left flank. The coach tore in two and he couldn’t outright tell if those bursts above which mocked him with light were stars or eyes. He cast, and cast again, at every dark figure which swarmed from the thicket with teeth bared toward his jugular. 

There were screams as the second coach went down in a pile of rubble. Emerald and red; killing curses and more intricate means of causing pain. As the minutes rushed it seemed almost pointless. They couldn’t even properly see what was after them. Or, perhaps, like him, they only wanted to refuse what they could see. 

There was a hand, or maybe ten. A hand in an eye, fingers growing out of the torso of a seven foot tall creature that had once been human but was decidedly not any longer. Mouths on their stomachs, breasts growing on elbows and bare skin where softer parts of anatomy would typically be. They fell away in ivory crumbs at the hit of magic. Their easy deaths did not make them easier to fight. 

Regulus spun. Caius was his thought. The man stood on the coach stern where the driver had once been. Below him, the horrors gained, biting at his oxfords until they had nearly amassed his frame. He cast with one hand, slitting throats with another. Regulus made an attempt to shoulder them off, to buy Caius time. It worked like chipping at a glacier with a butter knife.

In the end, it was the Mongolian lad with the heavy lidded eyes that leveled the field. Atlan- yes, Atlan Baatar. His magic a fumigator. A great billow of tendrils blew from his wand which choked each beast until Caius stood alone of the pulpit with an open mouth and a question on his brow. 

Regulus turned and killed twenty, then ten more and a smaller one that appeared to be a fledgling of its masters. He looked for Sebastian, likely dead in the damp and dark. Then, for Lucia. Last, for Crane. Nothing, only the thicket which swallowed and spat them up. 

One of the Kallizov’s- he couldn’t tell the difference between the two- lifted his arm to make note of a figure in the top of the tree-line. He didn’t have to speak. Regulus had thoroughly grasped the point. He raised his wand, Avada to the south, to the bower of oak that balanced the creature on vines of swung greenery. 

A howl, like no fox had ever made. Though, Regulus did feel like a hare as he turned to find an open jaw near inches from his cheekbone and geared to take a chunk of it. He swung with his shoulder, cracking its teeth. The Kallizov finished it off; an action that made him both grateful and thoroughly uncomfortable. 

The hoard fell like rows of wheat torn underway by the drop of a scythe. Quiet. The hum of air in an electric fit. Someone let off a full bodied string of curses that could turn the devil in his grave- ah, there was Lucia. 

What came from the tree was white. It plummeted, head cracking on a boulder and split down the skull like a squash. Regulus approached, across the thicket and into the woodland. It was dead, certainly, but if there was a way to bring it back and torture it, he would try. 

Vitruvian. A scar across the throat. He was almost certain he had killed this one on the train. They all looked similar. 

To his right, a branch creaked. Another ivory robed woman leaned down and kissed Crane on a mouth that didn’t appear any more alive than the swarm. Light flooded from her lips, not sucked away as a dementor might, but pressed inward until her throat bobbed like a cadaver forced to swallow. 

Regulus killed the Vitruvian. 

Then, he killed it again. Seven times in total. When it found its way to hell, he wanted the echo of this death to follow it down the cavernous flames and bound over the pits of mannon. He wanted to hear it rattling into eternity when he arrived there himself. 

“Are you murdered?” He asked the pile of Crane at his feet, nudging her limp body with the sole of his shoe. 

She shook her head, unconvincingly, but there was light left those eyes. 
 
Sturdy little beast. 

Regulus carried Crane over his shoulder like a drowsy sack of potatoes. She murmured in her sleep and repeatedly smacked herself as if she were being bit by insects. He hadn’t made it a stones throw from the coaches when a Kallizov bounded through the grass to take her for himself. 

Caius repaired the carriages with a spell while Atlan screamed names at the moon until every member of either faction had been accounted for. It was likely that neither of them would ever acknowledge that one had saved the others life. Avery would slit his own throat with a broken bottle before he murmured a thank you. Regulus didn’t know much about Baatar beyond his stellar lineage, but the lad didn’t strike him as the expectant type. 

Regulus was not above such displays. His life had been spared by one of them as well. He turned to where the other Kallizov was leaned against a wheel, taking long drags of a rolled cigarette. The scent of the bourbon smoke was intoxicating. He could tell the difference now. This one had a scar under his lip. Regulus nodded his head at the Bulagarian, who nodded back. 

“The horses and drivers are ash,” Said Kallizov, flicking the cherry of his cigarette all over his black waistcoat. “Who’s pulling the damn carts?” 

Regulus steered his eyes toward the woods edge. It was difficult to reanimate a corpse into a desperate sack of skin that would serve, but he had the magic for two of them at least. 

Chapter Text

Sebastian light footed it down an embankment.

The end of summer harkened in a chill that was made worse by the adrenaline in his body waning. These past months had felt like nothing but cold; the marrow freezing type that formed clusters on the eyelashes and pursed his lips together to keep the hot air inside rather than out. Donning a double set of cloaks made it nearly tolerable, as did the ski mask he wore taut around his jaw. What didn’t help, was the weather.

Rain blistered packed earth. Only a threatened drizzle at first, but the bullets were picking up speed. He trembled through a patch of briars, shook across the field and finally dropped to his knees where the girl had landed.

Sinai had seen the worst of it, he thought. The Deatheaters, particularly Regulus, lived next to horrors. The hell borne creatures which had tided through the underbrush were close to home for him. The Ouroboros, however fantastical and exuberant in their speech and narrowed eyes, were not quite accustomed to that level of shock. This was not a bad thing. In fact, if Sebastian were able to feel some drop of jealousy, he might. The Ouroboros’s condition wouldn’t last long, anyway. There were far too many miles to go, too much carnage to see. They’d be numb before it ended.

For now, Sebastian traced a line down the girls femoral artery. It had split, gushing blood all over her pants and pooling it in the pads of her shoes. He had watched her be dragged from the wreckage of the coach and carried off into the wilds. Watched, as a half-human took a chunk out of her leg and spit as if he were trying to rip stubborn plastic from a container. She fought like a coyote in a wire trap, gnashing, emboldened by each screech of their tongues. But, the fighting had stopped, and like all things, she bled.

Sinai Novak wasn’t long for the mortal world. Thankfully, they didn’t exist amongst mere mortals.

Sebastian closed her wound and rubbed a handful of gritty French clay over the gape. Her natural distrust wouldn’t allow him to further bind it with vines. After an expected bout of thrashing and threatening to bite him, he leaned back on his haunches. She would scar. A large gash that would snake down her thigh like a python in coil. Maybe, that suited her. Another trophy besides her nose that had broken as a young girl. That was the danger of playing in a river.

“If you don’t let me help, you’ll wear tonight for the rest of your life,” he breathed low, “And this scar, you won’t be able to hide.”

As if to make his point, she blinked rapidly with her right eye. The left one had lost most of its perception. For the last three weeks she had been eyeing shadows and loose forms, hoping that somehow her lenses would correct themselves. A misfortune beyond magic, though few things were. She didn’t have the courage to tell anyone that she was losing her sight, and Sebastian wasn’t going to inform her that she would awaken permanently blind someday. Though, he might yet tell her that seeing had nothing to do with vision.

Sinai stopped fighting him, and Sebastian tapered her wound. She stared at him, unblinking, and he knew what he must look like; just another vicious form crawling out of the darkness. To ease her mind, he lifted his hand and formed a ball of light at the fingertips so that she could drink in his eyes through the dank. Her breath quickened, then lulled.

“I know you,” she said, all of that beautiful strength flooding her lungs. “I know your eyes like the back of my hand.”

“At one time you did know me,” he returned.

“How? Where?”

“You don’t really want the answer to that,” he chuckled. “You’re just running through scenarios hoping that I am not someone you’ve done wrong to.”

She smiled, “Are you?”

“It wouldn’t matter,” he mused. “There are much larger things at play here. I believe you understand that, even though it irks you and makes you question every movement. Though, it frightens you down to your bones and breeds hate in your heart. When you look me in the eyes, you know that we have to be here.”

Across the field, her comrades called out for her. They split, searching every crevice and stalk for what they hoped wouldn’t be a lifeless body.

“You seem to know a lot about me,” she pursed her lips, then licked the blood from the cracks in them. “I don’t like it.”

“I’ll stop speaking if you start listening,” he offered.

This brought a crackle of laughter out of her. “I can’t make any promises.”

The chill picked up again. A flitter of wind touched the inner corners of Sebastians eyes and sent a stinging tear through his mask. He ached for the coach, for a set of walls and the heat of warmer bodies to keep it insulated.

“I thought this was the most terrible idea she has ever had,” Sinai remarked. “And christ, can she come up with some horrible plans.”

“He’s not any better,” Sebastian nodded toward Regulus, sauntering between the carriage wheels as he ordered recently reanimated Vitruvians into their places at the reins. “We just have to keep them alive for as long as they let us.”

Sinai huffed, and appeared to relent to the thought of it. She wouldn’t fully understand, not for weeks. The spark was enough.

Sebastian shouldered her from the ground, wrapping her into the outer layer of his cloak. Her arm met his waist and they stumbled foot for foot up the embankment.

A raven cawed from the tree tops. She made an effort to have her voice heard, but had only hatched last spring and was finding trouble in catching enough mice to keep herself fed. She would be plumper come November when the rains pushed gophers out of their holes and sent them scurrying through the fields. In May, she would nest and produce three eggs. Two would hatch.

Sinai grasped Sebastian tighter, using him as a sentient pole to heave herself through the rocks and rubble. He didn’t mind. Her hand had slinked between the cuffs of his robes.

Summer was almost over.
But god, she was so warm.

Chapter Text

Tommy was flailing.

Though, on the surface, she didn’t appear markedly different from the other traveler’s. Travellers- that's what they were now. A penned-up mishmash of bodies that all moved in the same rhythm, like the pendulum swing of a flat palm against war drum. Before they left London, there was a slight chance that this entire charade would be put to rest by midweek. That she might yet return to her bed in the boat house, drop a few notes on Enoch’s piano, and go back to business as usual with the death mask in her hand and a dead cult leader's blood beneath her nails. With a living father, or whatever the hell he was, and a viable excuse to kill Regulus Black and have it be over with.

That prospect had gone out of the window with the tipping of the carriage and with a coach's entrance into Paris, pulled by the desecrated bodies of the Vitruvian. Along with the vein of distrust on every member of her factions brows.

She had dragged them from their beds in the night like the orphans that they were; hadn’t even bothered to properly weapon them. They could kill her and be justified. Throw her over the ivory ramparts of the Chateau de Vincenne. Drown her in Seine until bubbles stopped rising through black water, leaving only the trail of city lights to brusk the surface in auburn strips. Nobody was watching. They could.

But, they wouldn’t. They would never do such a treacherous thing. Which made it so much worse.

Muggles moved in waves down the side streets, toothpicks in their teeth, a chatter on their lips. They funneled out of bars, unafraid of any psychopomp or psychopath which might greet them at the end of an alley. Paris didn’t know true darkness yet, not like London. The inhabitants guards were so low that Tommy would have been able to crawl inside their ribcages and nest there without them even realizing they had been infiltrated. Under street lamps, they kissed until their lips were red with wine and pressure. Music wafted over the remarkably visible stars, swinging and waning with every turn of the coach wheels.

Meanwhile, Tommy flailed.
Her only comfort was that nobody would suspect her of slowly losing it.

Maison Rose was a dingy hotel on the inlet of Rue de Princesse. On the outside, it melded into the black brick of every other night time establishment, open doors and a glowing red neon sign that claimed vacancy. There was no doubt that it was a magical hideout. A gargoyle flapped on the fire escape. The bellhop was a house elf. A finely tuned snap of his fingers loaded the Deatheaters luggage into a cart. The deadest tell was how Regulus lied to the check-in agent at the door. A name wouldn’t have mattered anywhere else.

His left eye twitched, en français.
“Nine rooms for Patrick Delavore.”

Once the agent had cleared the way, Regulus lit a cigarette, sucked in the midnight waft of petrichor, and turned to her. “Stop shaking like a wet dog; you’re going to get us caught.”

So it was noticeable.
Or, he was only being a prick.

Regulus was sturdy. A limber body completely unmoved by events that would have driven weaker men to tears and bottles. His white t-shirt had been unsoiled. Though, the knees of his trousers certainly required a stitching. Otherwise, he was as he always appeared to be: apathetic, narrow-eyed and strikingly good looking. Tommy hated him for it all; for the grace and the strength.

She briefly wondered why he hadn’t left her on the forest floor. The answer came swiftly; he wouldn’t let her die until his needs were met.

“Good luck Regulus Black,” she whispered. Her voice was weak and each word left a bad taste in her mouth.

“What does that mean?” He cocked his head, “Are you being cryptic?”

“It means what I said,” she skirted past him, thieving the Ouroboros’s keys from his palm.

His lip turned up in sneer. Christ, she was tired of that. “Are you leaving? We have a fucking deal, Crane.”

As expected, the inside of the Maison Rose vastly differed from its outward appearance. The doorway was rank with freshly cut roses, cologne and cigar smoke from the lobby bar. It wasn’t a packed establishment, but it had flair. Chandeliers, a fountain, and a well-marked exit route.

“Right now, I’m going to take a shower,” she returned. “You should do the same; you smell like a corpse. Don’t worry, I certainly won't be watching. I know how flustered you get about that.”

“I will hunt you down,” his threat was near silence, like wind rustling leaves. She had spent enough time in the wilderness lately to hear it for what it was; empty.

“And I will see you coming.” The elevator was full, so she took the stairs. The rest of the faction followed behind in varying lengths.

Dmitri bumped Caius’s shoulder hard enough to jostle him forward. Atlan laughed. Perhaps, some things hadn’t changed.

“That is quite enough of that.”
Arkady Kallizov pushed the bridge of his wide-rimmed glasses up the thin steeple of his nose.

Tommy hadn’t noticed she was pacing until he raised a brow at her. Though, it had taken some amount of attention to step over the cerulean throw pillows scattered about the finely crafted rugs. The Maison Rose was what Enoch would have referred to as ‘Gauche’ and what Dmitri called ‘fucking atrocious.’ Tommy thought it looked like an easter egg had hemorrhaged all over the wallpaper. The expansive windows were a nice touch, allowing rose-scented air to billow over the pages of the books she had brought.

It had been Arkady’s idea to condense all of their belongings down into singular pieces of jewelry. The entirety of her closet and personal library had fit nicely into a stolen teardrop necklace. Looking at the mess now, dresses and cloaks thrown over every bare surface, she had drastically over-packed. Not only in belongings but people. Dmitri hung limply over the side of the bed; open book thumbed to a page of an alchemy text while his brother tossed about on the carpet. The others slept in their bedrooms. Tommy imagined their rattled breathing after such an excruciating day.

She paced.

“You’re giving me whiplash,” Arkady moaned.

“I can’t think unless I move,” she retorted. The option to return to London and pretend that the previous day hadn’t occurred racked at her mind. They could beat feet for furthest rosses, though, that would make her something of a coward. By proxy, the Ouroboros would take a hit to the ego, which was preferable to the bolt of certain death. Dignity and martyrdom were too heavy to weigh side by side.

“Well, it’s horribly distracting.”

Tommy paused, only long enough to kick a book under the bed to give her ample space to move. “Then you try moving since you’re not doing any thinking down there.”

“I am pondering, actually. That Mulciber creature is awfully pretty. I wonder if she tastes like strawberries,” Arkady crossed a plaid-covered leg and mused.

Tommy made to take a step, but her ankles had been chained together with an invisible tether. She teetered on her heels as Arkady flicked his wand into a resting position.

“Untie me,” she barked.

“Stop pacing then,” Arkady shot back.

Tommy rolled her eyes, “Mulciber is a Deatheater. I’m shocked you haven’t considered bashing her skull in with a rock.”

In her peripheral, Arkady’s eyebrows raised to the ceiling. But, it was Dmitri’s stun gun stare that eyed her down from the bed. The words had slipped from her mouth before she had time to wager the implications of them. It hadn’t even been aimed at the correct target. Dmitri was the one that had been in the Triwizard hellscape, cracking a boy's eye socket open with a boulder ledge at the command of a Deatheater general.

He clicked his tongue. “Don’t you dare apologize. You already look weak as it is. Doe-eyed and flapping.”

“That was unkind of me,” she let her gaze fall to a naked cherub carved into the baseboards.

Dmitri flicked his brother on the shoulder, “Christ on a cross, she’s gone further off the deep end than we thought. Should we have her put down? It’s sort of cruel to watch her suffer.”

Arkady pursed his lips, “Below me, hell is freezing solid. Is that really the same Crane that threw herself over the kitchen table to bite a girls ear off three christmases ago? Has she gone defective?”

“She worked for a while,” Dmitri mused, “Do you remember when she called Enoch a pompous twat?”

“He must have whipped her too hard. Something knocked loose in her brain.”

“Can we have her returned? Is there a gift receipt lying around?”

Arkady shook his head in mock remorse, “I am afraid the orphanages are all closed. There’s a war, you know?”

“Shame,” Dmitri clicked his tongue, “We’ll have to turn her into glue and stew meat.”

Tommy folded her arms and straightened her chin. At a pause in the ample mocking of her character, she cleared her throat. “Are you finished?”

Dmitri blew her a kiss, running a hand down his naval. “I could go all night, my love.”

She tried to take a step, but her legs wobbled in the tethers. “I miss the days when you two were shorter and feared me.”

“I never feared you,” Dmitri lifted a finger to make his point. “However, I do long for being eye level with your chest again.”

Tommy sneered and retrieved the bone wand from the shoulder strap of her dress. Smooth in her palm, she sent one shock of magic to her ankles to untie the chain, and another to the soft flesh of Dmitri’s collarbone. If the electricity hurt, he didn’t make it known. Which seemed worse. If anything, he enjoyed it.

“Stop lamenting and come here,” he ordered.

Dignity in hand, martyrdom in mind, Tommy slipped across the room and sat at the base of the bed. Arkady moved his head into her lap while Dmitri sighed in her ear. For a split second, they were younger. Three parentless troubadours grasping onto the only comfort they had ever known. Necessity called for certain lines to be drawn in adulthood; there had been a time where they could play marbles in the low lamp light, or sneak chocolates from the cupboards in the boathouse kitchen. The older the twins grew, the hungrier they became. Confines made them ravenous. Keeping them out of the dangers of their own making was a full time job, one that she hadn’t exactly applied for, but took most seriously. But tonight, they wore their youth like shrouds- pink lipped and tired eyed on the throw pillows.

“We can go home. We can walk away, skip the Delavore’s ball and pretend none of this has happened,” Tommy said, chewing her lip absently. Such a place existed, ticking away in Arkady’s pocket.

“But, why would we?” Dmitri asked. “What is there, anyway? We’re too tall for those ceilings.”

“We’ll have to return eventually,” she hesitated, almost answering his question. They all knew what was there, Enoch, they had only avoided the topic for months. If the twins had ever visited him in his makeshift hospice, it was not to her knowledge. But, she liked to pretend they were still on the same page, filled to the brim with hope that he would miraculously pull out of his fever; that Tommy wasn’t entirely alone in her venture, only delegating orders to find a cure for death that nobody else truly believed in.

At least Regulus believed in it, not that it was a comforting thought.

“Eventually,” Arkady mimicked, “but now-“

“Fuck London,” Dmitri finished. “I want to see the sun a few more times before I wither away.”

“I wont drag you into certain death,” she wiped a finger on the baseboard, over a scratch in the wood that reminded her of the slit that Artemi the vampire had fallen ash crumpled into, then checked her finger pad for bubonic plague.

“I’m walking willingly,” Dmitri said.

“I’m practically sprinting,” Arkady mouthed.

“You always have to one up me,” the other twin sighed with a crestfallen tenor. “If I jumped off of a bridge, you would do a backflip from it.”

Once in a while, the Kallizov’s achieved a feat that very few had managed, making her laugh. This was one of those instances. It was the sort of simple argument that those who had spent far too much time with each other would have. There was a word for it, but it escaped her at the moment. Joyful annoyance, perhaps.

She abandoned her dignity further, slinking lower into the bed frame, “I know you’ll be ok. But what about them?” Her hand motion was to Atlan and Sinai, dozing in rooms further down the hall.

“If they decide they can’t take it, then let them go home,” Arkady shrugged. “More room in the coach.”

“That’s not very democratic,” she sighed. “It’s too dangerous to be apart. More so than being together, which is already a danger hard to beat.”

“Well, this is a fascist regime, anyway,” Dmitri whispered. “Then order them to stay. You’re thinking about it too much.”

At a pause, Tommy motioned to Arkady’s pocket. “Make sure there’s still a home to go to.”

At the order, Arkady flipped the watch out of his pocket, dangling the gilded chain inches from her nose before dropping it on the rug. With a crack of his neck, he rose. He waved his wand, the clock face opened, and he stepped gingerly into the ivory glass, slipping between the roman numerals into another world.

Arkady hadn’t vanished for more than a minute when Dmitri leaned in closer to Tommy’s ear, taking a strand of her hair and twirling it between his thumb and index. Once finished with that examination, he tucked it back into the crook of her helix and brushed his lips over the lobe. Whatever child-like innocence had overtaken him with his brother in the room had dissipated. Tommy rocked her head onto her shoulder, away from his advance.

“At least I am persistant,” he said.

Tommy hmmph’d.

Five minutes later, Arkady bounded out of the watch. It skittered across the room as his steps met the floor of the Maison Rose. He wore a scowl on his lips, and something else etched between his brows. Tommy’s heart beat a second rhythm. It didn’t look hopeful.

“Is Enoch ok?” She asked.

“He’s alive,” Arkady returned.

And that had to be enough for now.

The major issue with being able to see the present unfold like a paper owls wings were the grating questions that the past left unanswered. Like starting a story in the middle, some things would never be fully fleshed out.

Caius Avery looked up from a gin and tonic in the velvet clad bar of the Maison Rose as Tommy entered. There was no question of how he had managed to rise in the Deatheater's ranks, standing as a version of a general beside Regulus. His sheer brute strength would have made him a valuable asset for any organization that prided itself on death before dishonor and took the first half of that oath most literally. The boy could probably squeeze a confession out of a silent monk. What puzzled Tommy was how he had mastered the art of blending into the shadows despite his hulking frame. If she hadn’t had her gaze set on him before even leaving the bedroom, she wouldn’t have been able to distinguish him from a crack in the wall. He had learned that ability somewhere, had likely cultivated it over the course of a career that required stealth. But how? That was the question of Caius’s past. And as she approached, he lifted his glass, and knit his brows into a very pretty question mark.

“Hello serpent. What do you drink?” The words veered off of his front teeth as if he were chewing on them. “Not scotch, I hope. This place waters down every drop.”

“Red wine,” she said, taking the seat beside him in a far booth that hadn’t exactly been offered.

Caius snapped his finger at the bar maid, which made her blush despite the obscene gesture. It wasn’t charm that blended him with the bustle of wizarding business men that whispered as much about politics as they did high society, their wives, and the mistresses of that society whom their wives hadn’t caught on to yet. Though, he was dressed the part. He wore a strapping waistcoat over his barrel chest, a button-down shirt open an inch from the collarbone, and oxfords that had taken a beating from the overturned coach. The scuffs on the leather only added character. His dark hair was slicked to the side, accentuating a bold nose and thick eyebrows. In another life, he would have been softly handsome. In this one, his natural predisposition to curling his top lip made him difficult to keep eye contact with.

He was also, plainly, quite drunk.
This was preferred. Tommy wasn’t much of a drinker and hadn’t slipped down the winding staircase to have a glass of Malbec amongst the traveling suits and their bored dates. She had come with a question that needed to be answered before she could continue this foray into certain death. Speaking to Regulus only turned her in circles; a power he had over her that she had made attempts to leave unacknowledged. But, it was best to know ones own weaknesses.

Caius made an easier target. He sent another glance to the barmaid, tapping his wand on the counter to turn a bottle of red wine over into a carafe. In exchange, she sent it to float across to the room to him with an accompanying glass.

“Why don’t I remember you from Hogwarts?” Caius turned his attention to Tommy, neither wholly interested nor pretending not to be.

“I didn’t attend. My knowledge of this realm came late and by that time they had barred the doors to the school. For the best, I reckon. From what I gather, the curriculum didn’t exactly do any favors for anyone who wasn’t already versed in the dark arts.”

Caius scowled so hard it seemed that his lip might take flight. He may have raised right through the rafters if not for the low-hanging chandelier. “You’re muggle born?”

“Half muggle,” she corrected, taking a swig of the staunch red wine. It tasted less of fermented grapes and more so the memory of them. “I’m sure that turns your stomach.”

“It’s unnatural,” he spat.

The Avery’s were famous for their obsession with purity. Even long before Voldemort showed up on their doorstep to convince them that their red blood was really made of gold. Enoch had a file on them in the locked cupboard, a manilla envelope thick with the sins of their pasts. Mistreatment of muggles was of the higher treasons, though they did have a certain flare in their escapades. Treating a charmed human like a house elf was highly illegal before the turn of the war. But, it hadn’t been of exceptional priority for the ministry to imprison them. There were larger fish to fry before the wizarding authority came crashing down.

“Perhaps,” she said.

“So you agree?” Caius’s words were mostly slurred, but the contempt was clear as day. “Though, I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me that you hold some deep-seated hatred for yourself. Is it the self-loathing that has led you here? Do you think if you take down Vittra that Enoch will finally acknowledge you as the heir to his crumbling throne?”

Tommy hadn’t asked the question. It had answered itself, falling from his drunken mouth to land between the polished dinnerware and the napkin folded at her wrist. She had to suspect that the Deatheaters did not know the entirety of the deal made between her and Regulus. He had conjured up a half truth, leaving the death mask out of the equation. This was why they had looked upon the Ouroboros’s involvement with such confusion.

Though, it did not clear up her next question. Did Regulus even know where the mask was in the first place? Or was this simply a larger trap set only by himself?

“What does your leader think about you running rampant with the enemy faction?” She whispered. Nobody in this bar would remember them tomorrow, not beyond two young dreamers sharing a carafe of acidic wine. Still, it was best to keep voices lowered when talking of war.

Caius cleared his throat, “I don’t see how that is any of your business?”

“Enoch thinks it’s a fine idea,” she crossed her hands as she lied. That man hadn’t thought about a thing but water and the painkillers pumped into his blood for months. “Though, he knows we cannot trust you.”

“I’m sure the dark lords sentiments are similar.”

“You don’t speak to him directly?”

“What am I?” He chided, “an owl? Flying back and forth with whispers? If he says something is to be done, it is done.”

Tommy leaned back in the cool arch of the chair, “of course I wouldn’t call you an owl. You’re doing what your general says.”

“What Voldemort says,” he responded.

“Right,” she nodded, “What Regulus says.”

Caius smiled. “You’re trying to piss me off.”

“Yes,” Tommy smirked back. “Only because I am interested in this dynamic you have. Wouldn’t it be unwise not to ponder on such things?”

He pointed to her, savoring the words before letting them fly. “Watch your tongue, mudblood.”

Tommy waved him off, “Be civil. We’re in high company.

The French Minister hadn’t so much as wandered into the room as he had grabbed the space by its coattails and ripped it to attention. Tommy kept her eyes locked on Caius, watching the light in his irises slowly dissolve. Piere Ancout was not a formidable man. Not in the way that men seek to be feared, anyway. His stance was a foot lower than Avery’s even with the assistance of shoe lifts. He wore a dark grey suit that accentuated the salt of his peppered black hair.
Piere was no one in the sphere of British government. He was everything here and had not been quiet in his aims to dissolve the war across the pond. This wouldn’t make him public enemy number one to Caius Avery and the rest of his crew. But, he was certainly up there.

Tommy was quite sure Piere didn’t give a shit about the Ouroboros. This irked her.

“That’s your trick, then?” Caius asked. “How long were you watching him before he entered the room?”

“Only from the valet stand,” she sipped her wine.

To turn and look directly at the official wouldn’t result in anything dire. Still, she kept her eyes locked ahead until he was safely seated in a booth at the furthest end of the bar. The maitron swept by, bottles and olives clonking in her hold, and placed them before the man with a bow. Tommy supposed it paid to be incorrupt. People were more willing to assist you and throw bouquets at your feet. She had never particularly liked roses, though.

The booth was too dark to see who Piere had come to meet with. A shadow, even better concealed than Caius, sat slumped on the other end of the velveteen fabric. Tommy risked a look with her true eyes.

“Allow him to live long enough to gain more influence in Europe and he will tear out your throat. Take your steak knife and drive it in him,” Caius whispered. His voice had gone disembodied, fragmented in the stale air. It was discomforting to hear it hushed so close to her ear drum that he could have bitten the lobe off.

Tommy reeled her head around to push him away. But, there he was, sat on the other side of the table with his lips pressed firmly to the gin glass.

“As if killing him would do any good,” she sneered. “Especially here, of all places.”

Caius glared back with confusion knit between his brows. “I wouldn’t have thought so. He’s nothing more than a slight nuisance while he’s sat in Paris.”

“He’ll need to be taken care of eventually,” she retorted. “If you want him dead, use your own steak knife.”

Caius folded his arms on the table, “Harsh words, mudblood. Are you feeling alright?”

Tommy wasn’t sure that she was. The world had turned a bit, and she bit back the feeling as if she had suddenly been dunked beneath cold water. The wine had coursed through her blood faster than she anticipated.

“I need sleep,” she finalized.

Caius stood as she veered toward the exit. She kept her internal eye on him long after she had made it to the elevator. His waistcoat bulged at the pocket, and if she focused long enough, she could nearly make out the shape of a vial.

Perhaps poison was his game, and the dagger he trailed between his fingers was only a distraction. She didn’t have the time to develop that thought fully. The beds in the Maison Rose smelled like sweeter dreams, and she hit them at full speed.

Chapter Text

Regulus Black stepped out into the night to find both the full moon and the French Minister at his eyeline.

He welcomed the former over the latter, tucking chin to neck to press past Piere Ancout unseen. Wizarding society had dwindled to a point where any high family in the British pantheon had been deemed an enemy to the surviving ministries across Europe. Though, not all prominent names had joined up with the Deatheaters or Vitruvian. The others were simply dead, or hiding. Hell, even some of the sacred twenty-eight had packed up and moved to higher ground. Regulus didn’t venture to assume that his face would be engrained in Piere Ancouts memory, but he did have his father's eyes.
They would pass each other once more at the Delavore’s ball the next evening, wearing an intricate masquerade and skimming champagne flutes from floating platters. Tonight, they brushed past each other without a singular glance shared.

Once the Deatheaters gained enough ground in Britain, be that six or ten months time, the black tendrils would expand beyond the English Channel and lay waste to France from Avignon to Paris. There was a viable chance that it would be Regulus himself who drew Piere Ancout to his deathbed and slit his throat.

It hadn’t occurred to him prior that such things would need to be done. Not that he hadn’t considerably thought of the bloodshed that it would take to bring Europe to its knees. He had spent a night or two wide awake with magical Russian Oligarchs in his mind, images of Italian aristocrats weeping at his soles, the Greeks crumbled in rubble and ash. However, they were only names. Arbitrary titles assigned to leaders who he had not looked boldly in the face.

Keeping his head tucked low hadn’t vanquished him of Ancout’s pouted lips and aging fine lines. Regulus would remember the man now, in a plainer light. And when he killed him, he might even feel a bit bad about it.

Then again, by that time, death would be a mercy.

Paris was oil-slicked in a vastly different way from London. There was no smoke, only steam which ruptured out of drainage gates. Psychedelic music hummed from the rafters of a bar across the street. There were people, well, muggles, sauntering down the street in drives with their eyes to the skies. The puddles that stagnated in the valet line were reflective enough to give Regulus a sure look at himself. He was exhausted. The carriage overtipping had cracked a rib that he wasn’t concerned with enough to pop back into place. But, when he lit the end of a cigarette he had plucked from Avery’s nightstand, the sharp intake of air sent a pain through his abdomen.

Regulus needed to be better than this, to be beyond the quells of mortals, to not feel an ounce of anything, let alone, pain. It wasn’t sleep that would help, but the absolute lack of it. He needed, only once, to feel awake when his eyes were open.

Mostly, he needed to disband the purple under his eyes before Sebastian made him swallow down another herb leaden healing potion.

Regulus flicked the cigarette into the gutter and turned to his right. Avery was the sneaky one, Sebastian did well enough in disguising himself since he rarely allowed anyone to gaze upon his face. But, it was Lucia who seemed to be more black cat than woman.

She had appeared at his shoulder in a puff of smoke. Her dark curls were wild, billowing about her face as if their only task was to keep her even darker eyes from shining through. Tired as she may be, she wore it better than he did. A hint of peach remained in her sapped cheeks.

Regulus burst forward in the lead. Seconds later she was locked shortly behind him. This was the game; the same one they had been playing since they had learned to take flight. The two wove cat and mouse over the illuminated city like bandits on the flee of a heist.

Lucia wouldn’t catch him, she never did, and he briefly enjoyed that accomplishment as well as the feeling of being completely alone beside someone else.

A bell on a clocktower chimed midnight down below. That stir, along with the dogs that barked down the seine and set the eve alight with howls from further hounds became a sort of symphony. Up there, in the cloud bank, Regulus was suddenly more awake than he had been all day.

They flew low over the river, then high above the rafters of the Delavore cathedral. Caterers bustled through the back door, already in the throws of preparation for the ball. It seemed an extravagance beyond merit in these times - when so many others were floundering their way through life in attempt to simply stay alive, let alone stir cherries in their flutes and pluck lemon seeds from sweet tartes.

If Regulus hadn’t grown up in the throws of such opulence, he might despise it. But, the regret of one's own birthright had no place in the war. Princes, however nicely dressed, needed to become soldiers in times of war.

There wasn’t enough time for apologizing.

Lucia touched down on a penthouse roof and allowed her hair to fly free. Regulus did the same on an opposing building. Her tiredness had become evident. She wiped a bead of sweat from her forehead, and laughed like a hyena.

Regulus didn’t return her smile, but he did say “goodnight,” and tried to make it sound like permission.

Lucia nodded, and was gone.

He could count on one hand the amount of words she had exchanged with him over the last year. Each passing month had stolen a speck of her vocabulary, though that reticence was reserved for only him. She spoke to Caius, to Sebastian, to anyone else who stood in her path and ears to listen. Her solemnity toward him had to do with what he assumed was a serious case of lover spurn. After proclaiming such a thing to him, and having it gently thrown back in her face, there hadn’t been much room for idle conversation.

The problem was not that Regulus wasn’t fond of Lucia Mulciber. There were few things about her that one could find trouble with. Pristine lineage, a beautiful face, powerful capabilities that most witches at her age were not even aware of, let alone, had mastered. It was a deeper problem, that being; that she was her. When she looked at him he felt as if she was seeing a different version of himself, a better, cleaner, kinder caricature of what he actually was. It made him sick. There was no honor in lies.

When he looked back at Lucia, it was not that he felt some aching chasm of what might be at the end of this war. A picket fence. Two noble houses survived. Children in the garden and only half the amount of nightmares. It was that he didn’t think there would ever be a true end to it. Surely, not a curtain call that suddenly molded him into the better version that she yearned for. That problem being; that he was him.

When her hazel eyes slipped through the waves of her onyx hair, he didn’t see himself in her gaze as he wanted to be. He saw absolutely nothing. He experienced, absolutely nothing.

He certainly didn’t feel wide awake.

A market had been set up on the banks of the river. Regulus landed under the walking bridge with water up to his ankles. Boots sloshing in the scent of algae and moss, he moved up the bank, cloak tight about his jaw, and into slow dwindle of purveyors leaving the market.

Their coach doors were open, fine ornately crafted interiors set on brim to display jewelry, totems and blown glass. A young man slammed a trunk closed, sitting on the lid to keep it latched, and loaded into it his vessel. A woman across the street pulled bread from a skewer and dropped it into the mouth of a lazy dog under the back wheel. Children screamed in delight, fighting off bedtime, which annoyed him greatly.

Regulus hadn’t been attracted by the matryoshka dolls sat in a line on the stalls entrances. He had caught the whiff of magic floated up through the stacks of a carriage, salt and petrichor, mingled with the lingering scent of that bread and some herbs he recognized.

The market travelled together, that much was evident by the camaraderie shared around a glowing fire. But why? Half of them were muggles. Why would anyone with the means to have anything they wanted sell seashells on the banks of the Seine and sleep aside growling terriers?

His half-answer was a woman in the furthest carriage. She was around his mothers age. At that point in her life where her lips had grown tight and rarely cracked for a smile. She wore a waistcoast and tendered to a vessel of tea leaves, seeking the fates at the bottom of a porcelain cup. Regulus left her to her pointless work. Divination was only interesting if one had something to look forward to.

“Brave,” she cooed in French as she passed.

“Excuse you?” He whipped about, eyeing down the velvet tresses that grew to her hips. It briefly reminded him of Tommy Crane. But, to the young girl's credit, she was miles easier to look at.

“To be out so late,” she responded, setting down her cup and eyeing him. “Especially with what you intend to do. You work too much in the dark, you know? You’ll need the sun to see the light.”

“I am not buying what you are selling,” he huffed, and made to continue on.

The woman laughed, which irked him, as it sounded pointed. “She’ll forgive you, in time.”

Instinctually, he snapped his eyes to the cathedral. Lucia had long vanished, she was probably tucked safely into her bed by now.

“Stop it,” he ordered.

“What?” The woman tsk’d. “You’re afraid she wont?”

“I’m not concerned either way,” he shrugged and carried on.

“Typical,” she cooed, and again, “typical.”

Regulus peered over his shoulder at the sheer audacity of her. She must have been in her mid-forties, a wild-haired, wandering-eyed woman with her gaze plastered on the future, unaware of the threats of her present. She reminded him of the first diviner he had ever met. One that didn’t live very long at all once Voldemort had found disfavor in his fortune.

The woman’s presence enraged Regulus, the coil on an already dissatisfactory day. So much so that he couldn’t recall why he had landed in the river to begin with. She was taunting him with considerations that he didn’t wish to have drunk and bed-bound, let alone sober as a whistle and in a foreign city.

“You call me brave,” he shot back, meandering toward the stall. “Bravery is not it, no. I have sense. I certainly do not go about gallivanting with them during a war. I suppose you have lost your fucking sense. Can you find it in your cups, dear? Is it in your seeing cards? Or do you simply have it stored up your arse where you pull the rest of your tricks from?”

She hardly batted an eye. “You’re fighting a war you know nothing about, little boy. Of course, you’ll do anything to be seen as a man. Does that make your father proud?”

“You don’t know me!” He screamed, “I am no child, and you haven’t the slightest idea of what I have done and can do!”

The diviner chuckled, swirling the contents of her cup around once more before taking a sip of the little remaining liquid. Once she had spat toward his boots, Regulus moved forward to breathe into her ear.

“I will afford you mercy, as your insolence appears to be a chronic condition,” he pulled the mug from her grasp, turning it over on the table. “There are so many ways that I could kill you.”

“There is,” she settled on, mouth going straight and eyes cloudy. Genuinely perturbed by the idea, she snuck her gaze over his shoulder and sighed. “But, you didn’t let me finish telling you your prophecy.”

Regulus turned, heels in a storm down the cobbled stone. Through the cry of another child and the bustle of cars leaving the roadway, he heard her say something about foxes, and then more clearly. “She will forgive you, but it will be much too late.”

When Regulus awoke it was late in the day. He found that he had been sharing a bedroom for some time now. And by sharing, he actually meant that Caius had managed to drag himself into the elevator of the Maison Rose, but hadn’t found the path to his own chambers. He had, of course, been allotted the brain function that it took to magically flick the lock on the Regulus’s door. Yet, his slumbering place of choice was a path of gaudy rug between the bathroom sink and the lounge chair.

Caius was so large in stature that lying face down on his stomach meant that he took up the bulk of the room. His waistcoat had been discarded, shirt unbuttoned and flapping at his sides. His hair was less so plastered to his cheeks as it was glued and he smelled as if a shower might only scrub away the first ten sins he had committed the night before, the rest would require holy water, or an exorcism.

He looked a lot like Regulus who always awoke in the same state; annoyed, purple-eyed and starving. The hunger that threatened his abdomen didn’t feel as if it would be satiated by food. Tonight was the Delavore’s ball and he was going to ensure that Tommy Crane got her eyes locked on Vittra. Then, he would assist Crane in dispatching her at the next location. One more day. Perhaps two if the travel went poorly.

Regulus used Caius as a floor rug to get into the bathroom. “Wake up. I have told you on multiple occasions that your overindulgences will not impede our missions. Not that you listen, but today you need to be at your best.”

Caius groaned in reply.

The water that shot from the shower head was baltic. Regulus didn’t mind, chucking his boxers on to the floor and stepping into the basin to feel his bones turn rigid. For thirty seconds he was lost in the act of trying to survive the chill. When the water went scalding, he missed the rote exercise of breathing.

“Get up!” Regulus shouted, pulling the curtain to the side to get a look at the heap which was Avery.

Caius groaned, this time in a minor chord. At least they were making progress.

The ball did not start until the evening. However, by the time Regulus had managed to threaten Caius into the shower and back into his waistcoat, it was already high time to start moving the others into action. As Regulus knocked on doors and took multiple trips to the window for cigarettes and coffee, Caius swept back and forth from the base of the toilet to the water on the mantle.

Regulus himself donned the suit that he had worn to Gawain’s funeral. Not that he had actually been in strict attendance. The attire was only used long enough to stand at the edge of the Riddle manor and watch the remnants of Gawain dropped faintly into the dirt. For this occasion, he had added a boutonniere. It didn’t offer any cheer. Though, Vittra’s throat was probably soft enough to drive the needle end of the rose into her esophagus and twist.

As the boys stepped into the long hallway, they were immediately greeted by Sebastian and Lucia. The former was already wearing his mask, a stark black porcelain piece covering the entirety of his face. The silk scarf wrapped around his neck should have done well enough to keep him warm, but he shivered.

Lucia wore a black dress. It had pearls. Or buttons. He didn’t look that closely.

“And the others?” He asked as Atlan Baatar meandered out of his room. Caius’s gaze seemed to linger on the man. Regulus paid little attention to it. Like a once favored son who didn’t care for his step-siblings, Caius was annoyed by anything new and shiny.

“They’re coming,” Atlan yawned, rocking his head on the door frame.

Regulus placed a hand into his pocket, “at a more exemplified pace would be welcome.”

Atlan shrugged, “rouse them yourself, then.”

Regulus nodded to the Kallizov’s door. Caius beat his fist against the knocker and was returned with muffled, “hold on a moment, you big cunt.”

Atlan laughed.
Regulus missed the humor in it.
He checked his watch.

“Fucking Crane,” he mumbled.

Atlan sighed, “Try her room then if you’re in such a hurry.”

Regulus nodded toward the furthest end of the hall. He had purposefully stuck her as far from his as the space would allow. Her vision could traverse continents but it had given him some minute amount of reassurance that she couldn’t place her ear to the wall and listen him sleep.

Caius took his punishment, moving at a snails pace down the corridor to rap on her door. There was his incessant knocking, and then nothing. The Kallizovs propped their door open and lounged on it like two long stick candles threatening to topple over and start a fire. Sinai joined them through her own threshold.

“Try again,” Atlan said.

Caius tried. Nothing.

“We have to go,” Lucia murmured, her eyes pleading toward Sebastian, who pleaded in turn toward Regulus. A nice system they had set up to keep Lucia from ever having to address Regulus directly. It only added to his annoyance.

“Well!” Atlan called, “you’re not even trying!”

This time when Caius beat on the door it nearly came off the hinges. Regulus, thoroughly disavowed of his will to wait any longer, palmed his wand and used it to turn the knob.

Caius propped the door open and sighed so deeply it broke the sound barrier. “She’s not in there.”

“Oh, that’s right,” Atlan said in mock recall. He wiped a hand down his face, “she’s been in the lobby for hours!”

Regulus could kill them all. Truly, it wouldn’t be that difficult.

Chapter Text

Tommy Crane was Enoch’s favorite child. This fact was neither a positive or negative. It was, simply, the truth of the matter.

When the Ouroboros children were whipped, Tommy was whipped less; when his hands were calloused, hers grew slightly softer; and when he spoke to the orphans as a whole, Tommy was regarded with a hint more humanity.

It didn’t matter that they were not related by blood. Nor, did it count for anything that Enoch had pulled her from a rat infested orphanage with a mold problem in the hidden islands and plopped her into a orphanage with far fewer rats and less food scarcity. She was, and always would be, the greatest project that he had ever embarked upon. And thus, she acted as so.

Enoch had taught her how to play piano, so she did. Her long fingers wrapped amble over the keys, drawing out some near forgotten tune that had been named for a blackbird. The lobby of the Maison Rose was largely empty. A few stragglers leaned back in their velvet clad chairs, wafting cigar smoke over the place until taking deep breaths felt akin to walking through fire. The rest of the them would already be at the Delavore’s, or, making preparations to arrive late to draw more attention to their fine silks and Italian crafted garments.

Enoch hadn’t had a preference in clothing, but he did admire the color green. Tommy wore it like a suit of armor. The gown fell off of her shoulders and into long waves that graced the floor and created tides about the piano seat. It had been crafted out of the curtains from the hotel room, torn down and rearranged into a more pleasing color and shape with the assistance of the magic she had used to make all of her clothing. The British wizarding seamstresses were all dead, or on retainer for causes that didn’t cater to generals making aims of war in foreign countries and gaudy bars. A muggle tailor would have worked fine, at twice the price and triple the time. She wore the teardrop necklace, as well as a set of stolen gold earrings and a thieved thin bracelet. It would do, and not come undone. Otherwise, she would certainly be the most interesting spectacle of the night if the magic gave and she stood stark naked in high company.

Enoch Ames drank. Whiskey, specifically.
Tommy preferred the dry fruit of a half glass of Malbec that sat on the piano top.
She still held pieces of herself, even if they were only on lease.

“There you are,” Regulus sighed as he meandered over the gilded inlay of the granite floor. He said at is he had been looking for her for some time, and as if that time had worn him down to the point where he had almost given up.

As always, he looked ravishing in an uncomfortable way. There existed in the world a certain subset of people who were so elegant to look at that it could cause nearsighted blindness in the viewer. This feeling was typically only reserved for art pieces, sculptures of Goddesses, and the men who had been birthed from them. Regulus Black was of that type. She hated him for it. She couldn’t look away.

“Here I am,” she returned, and he didn’t drop his gaze either.

Tommy had spent the majority of the night in an inescapable terror. The nightmares were of the sort that couldn’t be banished even when she woke in a sweaty panic. The moment her head hit the pillow, they would pick up tenfold. Always, surrounding one particular figure and a memory she hadn’t succinctly handled.

A Vitruvian woman had kissed her, near seconds before dying at the hands of the man before her.

That kiss had left something. A tainted taste in her mouth. A headache knocking at the back of her cranium as if someone was begging to be let in.

It had been her first kiss, so maybe they were all like that. Or, more likely, only the ones that hadn’t been asked for. Either way, her lips felt chapped.

“It’s time to go,” Regulus said. His eyes were wide and crystalline, like pools that flooded in from a mountain spring. Below them, the line of his mouth was pouted and seemed to say, no swimming.

She had also thought of Regulus in the night. Though, not in dreams.

Reality was inescapable. Tommy was tired, so tired that the morning had required a very long meditation on how to get out of bed and face the possibility that more horrors awaited her than what she already expected. All of this thinking, and lack thereof, had boiled down to a point that she had previously been too frightened to come to. That realization, was just that. She was frightened. She was scared of Vitrra and what the woman was capable of. She was in terror at the thought of failing.

Above all was that thing that thing which she feared the most, Regulus Black.

Their immediate disdain for each other hadn’t surprised her. He was from an enemy faction and at the highest rank of it. But, she had come to find, possibly far too late, that her hatred was something else. She was well and truly unnerved by the devil in a waistcoat.

Fear was it’s own sort of power.
That energy which kept soldiers moving and empires stood strong through the bleak, against all odds. Courage was born from fear.

Enoch Ames had taught her that.

Across the room, Caius Avery and Lucia Mulciber wandered up to the bar to fetch a parting shot of whiskey. Lucia donned a beautiful black gown, finely tailored with bronze pearls down the corset. It was not a cheap number. The sort of dress that Tommy could only hope to wear one day, let alone, find hanging limply in her closet as if it were nothing but a piece of daywear. She suspected Lucia owned many such dresses.

Tommy did not fear those two, not any more than a fox stands in peril at the company of field mice. Though, they looked at her as if she should.

“Where’s your mask?” Regulus asked, leaning on taunting. A mask was what she was after.

“I’ll have to borrow one,” she answered, folding her hands into her lap. “Surely, the Delavore’s will have extra.”

Regulus reached into his waistcoat for his own, a white piece that would fit snuggly over his nose bridge but leave the lower half of his face perfectly unobscured. In a strange and uncharacteristic act, he pulled a second totem from his pocket. He stepped forward and wrapped the delicate, black, half-faced mask over her hair and tied it in a tight ribbon.

“Consider it a loan until you get the real thing,” he sucked at his teeth. “Do your diligence tonight, and you will have it much sooner.”

It had, of course, occurred to Tommy that he had been lying this entire time. She thought about his cruel serpent tongue and the fables they could tell on a near constant basis. At this moment, she just tried not to think about how the spice on his cologne made her stomach turn.

-

“Good God,” Tommy huffed, sneering at a pantomime that cartwheeled past the troupe on their ascent up the Delavore’s stairs. “These people have no shame.”

The black and white striped little devils leaped to and fro in an attempt to catch the bubbles that blew from a cogged machine at the entrance. They backflipped and tumbled, hands up and mouths in a constant state of awe. A flood of people gawked and ooh’d at the display. They had to know that the pantomimes were not on hire from a morbid circus who had brushed into town for a private party. Their eyes were all bleak, blackened at the iris and void of any light. These were muggles beneath an imperio charm, forced to dance for the supper and a chance to be let free without the inherent knowledge that they were being forced to do so.

It was highly illegal. Not that the Delavore’s cared. The French minister would be in attendance as well as a slew of other officials from across Europe. These heftier transgressions would be seen as near mild misdemeanors in the company of European nobility.

All the devils, little or large, were allowed to have their fun tonight.

“You and your bleeding heart,” Regulus mocked at her side. He had forced himself to stand at her right as the group paraded up the marble stairs and into the belly of the ballroom.

Dmitri, in either annoyance at Regulus’s presence or simply eavesdropping, had shoveled his way in on Tommy’s left but hung in the peripheral. As they swept past swaths of people wearing their finest clothes and donning their wickedest smirks, she was reminded of his original insistance that she shine light on Regulus’s black heart. It would have been the time for light in any case. The ballroom was so lowly lit that she couldn’t make out a substantiated form, let alone, find Vittra in this growing crowd.

A saxophone player on the hulking stage dropped a slow melody before the rest of the band chimed in. People began to flush and move further toward the bar.

Tommy was pushed from behind, and when she turned her head, found Atlan breathing down her neck. “Why didn’t we think of that?” He was referring to the wait staff passing out glasses of champagne. Muggles, again, imperio’d to serve. Tommy was quite sure he didn’t directly mean that they should curse their way to constant opulence, but rather, they should use the lower class to their advantage. Atlan had once been a pureblood prince of the Mongolian wizarding faction. Occasionally, that rich blood showed itself.

When Tommy snapped back around her foot caught a rivet in the floor. Her knee buckled momentarily, fall evaded and easily recovered. Still, she found that someone was quicker than her. Dmitri had placed his hand at the soft part of her lower back to keep her straight. When her head turned to throw him thankful eyes, he was walking with his arms at his side and a scowl.

It was Regulus who squeezed her back, not all too friendly, “walk like you belong here.”

Tommy shook him off, “We should split up and cover more ground.”

At this, Regulus snapped his fingers at the deatheater’s and twirled his index. They seemed to catch the point, meandering to the outskirts of the ballroom to survey.

Tommy found Sinai in the fray. The moment Tommy approached, the dark haired witch grabbed at her as if she wasn’t quite sure who she was. The masked crowd must have been weighing on her nerves.

“Send the others around to look for anyone who could be a Vitruvian general, or Vittra herself and then find me.”

Sinai did not appear confident, but her grasp loosened.

Roughly ten seconds passed between them, a knit in Tommy’s half disguised brow and a purse on Sinai’s lips. Then, Regulus grabbed Tommy’s arm as if he were trying his best at chivalry before whisking her away into the crowd.

“A drink.” He demanded, obscured eyes roaming the room. He stole two glasses of champagne from a tray with nimble fingers and forced one into her hand. The movement was so slight and comfortable, despite his reverberating nerves. There was no doubt that he once belonged in these circles. “Are you even looking?”

“This was the stupidest plan that you could have come up,” she shot back. “I can’t make out anyone in here.”

“Try harder, then,” he chided. His grip on her arm tightened as he moved her forward. “Perhaps, if you had done some research..”

“Yes, you’re right. Since I have had so much time on my hands between being dragged across foreign lines and made to fight for my life.”

Regulus scoffed, “poor you. Do you want the mask or not?” After a pause, he sighed. “There’s Madam Delavore. Keep your sight on her while we move.”

Tommy took in the low and slow form near the stage. The madam had donned an azure ball gown that resembled a table cloth. Her crimson mask covered her face in dropping crystals.

Wealth is power. Imagine the estate that a woman like that leaves unguarded. No children, a useless husband, you could grasp it like an apple.

The words echoed inside of Tommy’s head as if it had been drilled into her. She didn’t know anything about the Delavore madam’s finances, but the image of an unsecured vault played at her mind. Maybe, it was knowledge she had accidentally picked up in prior conversation. Christ, she was so tired she couldn’t tell which thoughts were hers and what ones she had adopted.

Tommy’s eyes grazed the crowd. Pierre Ancout made his way over the Delavore’s table to whisper what seemed to be sweet nothings in the madams ear. He was distinguishable, the shortest man in the place.

“Are they having an affair?” Tommy asked.

Regulus followed her eyes with a sneer, “Nothing truly belongs to anyone here.”

“That certainly explains why she can get away with the imperio.”

“Let it go,” Regulus sighed, “They’re only muggles.”

Tommy tried to drop it, but what little remained of her morals harped on her. She could have easily been one of these pantomimes in another life. Though, muggledom was a curse she hadn’t considered for a very long time, it was true. Had she been cast forth into the world and into lesser circumstances, she would know still know pain and suffering, only without the magic that made it worth bearing.

Across the room, Arkady had plucked a debutante out of the masses and strode onto the floor with his hand tight against her waist. He had a way of making deviance look gallant. Directly against Tommy’s orders to survey the crowd, he had decided to pick from the fruits instead. The twiggish girl sashayed onto the floor with him in perfect step. They danced through two songs while Tommy stood uncomfortably rocking on her heels.

Regulus briefly abandoned her for his own target. A girl in a purple dress that made her look like an overly frosted cupcake. She swooned under his attention, tilting her head forward so that he could make comments about the tiara she wore tight against her tawny curls. Tommy looked away as he fingered the encrusted jewels.

“Which member of the monarchy is she?” Tommy asked as he returned to her side.

“There are no more monarchies in wizarding Europe,” he remarked back.

“She’s wearing a tiara. Must be someone important.”

Regulus pursed his lips. “None of them are nearly as important as they wish they were.” His hand fell out of his waist pocket as he grumbled, “Still nothing, Crane?”

“Give me a minute.”

Frowning, he leaned forward to survey the area. “We should dance, it will give us a better vantage point from the center of the ballroom.”

Tommy laughed, wholeheartedly, before catching the sincerity on his face. Her voice drew monotone, “I think I will have a walk around instead. You go enjoy the champagne and young ladies, they’re almost as pretty as you are.”

He sighed, and mumbled under his breath. Tommy couldn’t make out the insult, she was already dodging across the room. As expected, he returned his gaze to the purple pastry and made himself busy. Tommy, on the other hand, had stepped into the line of Pierre Ancout’s short shadow.

The little devil has no moral compass.
A wife and kids at home.
The madams perfume on his bobbing throat.
Doesn’t it smell like rot?

Once more, the thought permeated her senses as if she were living in it rather than thinking it. At first, she thought he may have whispered it himself. But, his lips were tucked tightly to a wine glass and his attention was on matters more pressing than the fire haired girl that had bumped into his shoulder as she spun.

The air was constricting amongst the parade of silks and sashes. Tommy had the distinct feeling that she had suddenly stepped into a wire trap, as if the eyes that peeked out beneath masks were seeing directly into her soul. She pressed palms to her ear to ensure she wasn’t speaking her thoughts out loud. Quiet, for a moment, and then a ringing. Once she let go, it was music and mumbles, groans and sliding footsteps, three hundred bodies crowding toward the dance floor in a singular rhythm.

She caught Dmitri’s gaze through the crowd, worrying.

Don’t approach.
Your thinking is so much clearer alone.

Tommy argued with herself that she had never actually been truly alone in her life. There was something in her head feeding false information through a feedback loop that sucked every ounce of energy from her. She had gone insane, perhaps, had finally tipped over the barrel that held her good sense and all of it had leaked out onto the polished floors.

She heard buzzing, and flicked an invisible wasp off of her shoulder.

Look at me.

This time, it wasn’t her voice. It wasn’t Avery’s or Regulus, not familiar in any regard, but distorted and raw like whispers through a hollow can. She closed her eyes.

I see you, and this sounded like a plead, a child pulling on its mothers coat. Tommy Crane, see me back.

Tommy opened her eyes.

The man who stared at her from across the dancefloor was a tree trunk in a white suit. He didn’t fit in well amongst the gently clothed society mice. A rat king was a viable description, as he seemed to pull all of the other rats from their hiding places to crowd around him. She couldn’t make out much of his face behind the gilded mask, but if she had to make an educated guess, she would say he looked better with it. His demeanor was what gave the ugliness away, hunched and skulking. The other rats crowded in, all dressed in ivory.

Not him. Me.

Tommy flittered her gaze over the room once more and landed on a rat to the mans left. Thinner, feminine, beady eyed and lauding. She didn’t bother to keep her vision strained, the bigger one was moving forward with dragging feet.

If corpses could walk, they would fall into a similar gate. She happened to know that on occasion, they could. She looked for Regulus Black, but found Dmitri in the middle of a dance with a debutante.

Wrong again.
What good has he ever done you, Tommy?
Look for me.

It was Regulus’s voice now. He mocked her from inside of her own mind. A habit he was quite adept at. Still, it was not quite correct. The inflection was all wrong, anyway, and Regulus never called her Tommy. It was always Crane.

Against her will, her eyes pleaded for reprieve. The infiltration was starting to hurt. This was nothing like legillimancy, it hardly seemed to contain any magical property at all. Like speaking to a God and hearing a reply in the brute wind, this was divine interruption of the worst sort.

A figure toward the stage lowered her head ever so slightly. Tommy could appreciate beauty, even in a raw and formidable form. This was such a case. The woman tipped her glass toward Tommy before emptying it onto the floor. The partygoers around her chortled and laughed, one falling to his knees to lap up the liquid like a dog. The woman would look pleased if she could be seen behind a giant gilded masquerade that dripped with quartz down her ivory gown. Tommy was sure she enjoyed the display.

Tommy was also quite sure that the room has started to smell like rot.

You look so lovely, daughter of Enoch.
Come sit on my lap, little bird.

The voice was clear. Entrancing.

Tommy attempted to pull her gaze away but found it locked in the fine cut of those jewels; the tower that rose from a tight bun of black hair in golden spires like a brass quill held at candlelight; the sheer terror of her stature. Unfortunately, the woman had the sort of eyes that could drown men in their whiskey tint. Tommy swam for her life.

In her peripheral, the rat king had come up on her shoulder. He could disapparate her, if there was any magic left in his cold body. The rules of life and death, of magic and war, had seemed to flip on their backsides. She held her gaze on the woman, but clutched the rats arm before he could snap at hers.

Tommy gripped, nails to flesh, and drew blood. She squeezed until the man’s knees buckled and his arm swung to hit her. Then, she dodged, grabbed his other wrist and drove sharpened points into soft veins.

He was very much alive, he only smelled as if he had been rolling about in a pit of corpses. Droplets of blood coated her fingerpads as he seized forward, but he lost momentum and will, or someone had stolen it from him. He relaxed in Tommy’s grasp, and she used the opportunity to press for more force until his blood dripped down the hem of her gown.

“Get out of my fucking head,” she mouthed.

Don’t make a scene.

“I’ll kill him.”

Do as you wish, but you’ll miss the show.

The crowd had begun to catch the spectacle unfolding. A girl gasped at her right, the purple cupcake drawing hands to her mouth as if she were witnessing the most heinous of faux-pas. Dmitri halted his dance, dropping his hand to his wand and clutching it.

Regulus was faster. His black curls swept over the shorter patrons, eyes wide beneath his mask. He sent a stinger to the rats knees, forcing him on all fours. It was such a gentle display of power, a hardly noticeable wand movement. A second later, he blew the lights out of the chandelier.

The shrieks and dismayed laughter were short lived. But, it took enough attention off of Tommy for her to bolt backward from the man. Regulus grasped her around the hip as she stumbled, and with one hand, he wiped the pooling blood from her nails with his handkerchief.

Tommy breathed in his ear, “Vittra is here.”

“Good,” Regulus sighed, relieved. “Now, you’re going to dance with me, and drink, and act as if you belong here before you get us locked in the cellar.”

“She’s in my head,” Tommy moaned into his shoulder. Maybe, she wasn’t anymore, but she had been. A splitting headache was proof of that. “I don’t know what to do, how to make her stop.”

Regulus eyed her down as if she might be exaggerating. His pouted lips pursed and then relaxed. An eyebrow raise, the tilt of his chin. All apathy had abandoned him as he spoke, low and amused, “Do you know how to waltz?”