Paperwork

Harriet's jaw jutted out belligerently. "How would you know?" 

The receptionist shrugged. "You've got a press card sticking out of your pocket. And since you're with two friends of Mr Pucey's, I assumed your being here would have to do with his arrest." 

Harriet seemed momentarily speechless. Very momentarily. 

"Quite. That's exactly the type of acute observation we were looking for in someone like you, actually. Yeah, I am with the Prophet, but I'm not really here professionally, so to speak. See, we're all mates of Ade's, all three of us, and we've got this creeping feeling someone is trying to frame him. Now we thought you'd make a perfect starting point in our investigations, being in a position where you get to deal with just about everyone in this building on a regular basis. I've been told you'll be off in a few minutes, that right?" 

The receptionist looked to her right, at a runic timer on her desk, and nodded. "Yeah, I'm off at four." 

"You got a canteen in here?" 

"Oh, yeah, down there... It'll be deserted by now, though..." 

"Perfect. Don't want anyone hearing what we're on about before we know who we can trust, now, do we?" 

The receptionist considered this for a few seconds. "I suppose so." 

Flint, Bletchley and Harriet settled on a pair of plush sofas in what was clearly intended as a waiting area, set up in a corner of the hall. The witch at reception spent the remainder of her shift redirecting the central Floo terminal to deliver messages directly to the relevant office, briefing a small coven of cleaners, and terminating the Uninvited ward that had been cast around the firm's broom park. Rising behind her desk, she finally gestured to where she'd earlier told them the canteen should be. 

"If you'll follow me."

Harriet kept her hand firmly on her wand as they sauntered past an empty showcase and counter into a hall littered with hexagonal tables and three-legged chairs. The receptionist sat down on a bench overlooking Diagon Alley – the view was quite remarkable, actually – Flint and Bletchley plumping down on either side of her, closing her in as if she were in possession of the Quaffle. Though Keeping had always been her forte on the pitch, Bletchley had to admit she was beginning to see the thrill of the Chase. Harriet pulled up a chair and slung her legs around its backrest, coming eye to eye with a perky blonde witch who seemed unaware of anything remotely suspicious, and who sat looking around her with wide, expectant eyes. 

"Alright, where do you want to start?" 

Harriet smiled and cocked her head. "How's about some introduction to start things off, eh? What's your name?" 

"Sharon Johnston." She turned to Flint. "You knew that already, didn't you? I told you, I'm sure I did..." 

Flint shrugged. Harriet waved her into silence. 

"No, not that. We know what you've told our man Marcus here. What we're interested in right now is your real name." 

The blonde witch frowned. "What do you mean?" 

"Don't bother." Harriet's smile had gone; her current expression put one in mind of the one Ms Pince wore when she asked a student if they knew how pages 30 and 31 of The Seventh Seal – A Brief History of the Selkie had got stuck together like that. 

"You see, I know our Shannon's cousin Sharon. She's twelve. Now, I know there is such a thing as coincidence, but all things considered – especially the little matter of someone with Death Eater connections apparently being employed here – we'll stick with our other option for the time being. So let's try again, shall we? Who are you?" 

The receptionist stared blankly back at her before burying her head in her hands. Resurfacing with a sigh, she looked up at Harriet, who was leaning forward in her chair expectantly. 

"I've really cocked up, haven't I?" 

"Looks like it." Harriet blinked; if anything, she now seemed intrigued. 

Bletchley waved a hand in front of them. 

"Excuse me? Could someone fill me in, here? What exactly has been cocked up?" 

Formerly Sharon chewed her lip. "Probably be best if you could get a Floo through to the Department itself. Hear it directly from my supervisor, like." 

Harriet sat up. "Department? Which one?" 

The receptionist shook her head. Very little of her earlier perkiness remained. "Not here. Somewhere smaller. Somewhere the walls don't have ears." 

Bletchley folded her arms. "Now let me get this straight You lie to us about who you are, with some rather suspicious timing might I add, and now you're asking us to follow you into some obscure, isolated corner of this building? A building you're more familiar with than any of us? Tell me," – she pointed at Flint – "Do his robes say, "I'm with stupid"? They don't, do they? Then I guess I'm not. Stupid enough to fall for this one, that is." 

Formerly Sharon nodded. "You're right. You should never put yourself at a disadvantage." She sighed. "I guess you'd have been far better at this than I've managed so far. Anyway, best if we could find some sort of neutral territory, I'd say " She chewed her lip. A single, deep wrinkle furrowed her forehead. Flint, who'd been silent throughout the exchange, rose from the bench. 

"Think I might have just the spot. Come on." 

He led them back into the hall, to the central Floo terminal, scooped some powder from the urn-like container provided with one hand, and took Sharon's wrist with the other. Bletchley raised an eyebrow. Flint shrugged. 

"Can't afford to lose her on the way, can we? Harriet, you take her other side Karen, I take it you can follow by yourself?" 

Bletchley snorted and took a pinch of Floo powder. Flint tossed his own into the patient flames of the terminal. 

"Guildford Ward Field Research Centre, room 102." 

The terminal's hearth was large enough to allow the three of them to step into the flames at a time, Sharon securely flanked by Flint and Harriet. Bletchley waited for their small spinning silhouettes to fade from sight, then chucked some more powder after them, repeated Flint's words, and stepped in. 

The first thing she noticed about the room she stumbled into about half a minute later was the noise, a deafening buzz that seemed to come from the walls themselves. Upon a second glance, however, she found that the walls were lined with shelves, stacked with wire cages. In each cage, a fluffy, cream-coloured furball lay humming sedately, some dangling a thin, pink tongue down to trail along the floor, on the prowl for dust bunnies. Puffskeins. Bletchley stuck a finger though one of the cages, but ran into some sort of barrier inside it, about three inches from the creature. She frowned; Flint grinned. He shouted something she didn't quite catch. 

"What?" she yelled over the puffskeins' collective hum. Flint shook his head, gathered them all round the Floo terminal, drew his wand, and cast a spell around them. The hum fell to a distant throb. Flint turned to Bletchley. 

"I said, don't bother, it's got an impact ward around it. Cast only last week, and those can hold for up to a month. You could drop a fucking anvil on top of that little bugger, and it would bounce right back. But anyway " He turned to Sharon, still in Harriet's firm grip. "Terminal's all yours." 

Sharon turned and threw in some powder from a bowl at her feet. "Operator?" 

A bespectacled, middle-aged witch's face appeared in the flames. "Yes?" 

"I'd like a secured connection with the Department of Mysteries, please." 

Soon, the middle-aged face was replaced by that of a tanned young wizard with blonde highlights, who nodded in greeting. 

"Ah, Ms P. – Mr Bode's office, I presume?" 

Sharon – Ms P. – gave a curt nod, and soon, a greying wizard's face appeared between the hearthstones, eyebrows raised expectantly. 

"Er Still "city dweller", isn't it, sir?" 

Bode nodded. "Indeed it is, Margaret. Now what is it you wanted to see me about?" 

Sharon's – Margaret's – face fell. "I'm afraid I've been busted, sir." She stepped aside to reveal Harriet, still hanging on to her sleeve. Bode fell silent; then, a grin spread across his face, and he let out a chuckle. 

"Ah, Ms Mills I was wondering how long it would be before you'd find us out. You've been reporting the attacks for the Prophet, haven't you?" 

Harriet nodded. "Seems we're trying to get to the same point from different directions, don't it?" She gestured towards Margaret. "She an Unspeakable, then?" 

Bode smiled. "This young lady is Special Auror Margaret Puddifoot. We've had our eye on Maynard & Harris since the raid that followed the one on the Bloom residence, and we decided to plant her at Reception when a position became available there." 

Margaret sighed. "My very first assignment, and I flamingoed up Like cocking up, only on a larger scale," she added mournfully as Flint and Bletchley gave her some very peculiar looks. 

Bode shrugged. "Don't blame yourself for not doing perfectly on your very first assignment, Margaret. As I said, I was expecting Ms Mills to catch up with us sooner or later. What matters is the Other Side don't. I take it the remainder of this delegation's here on account of Mr Pucey's arrest?" 

Flint and Bletchley shifted as three pairs of eyes fell on them simultaneously. Harriet turned back to Bode. 

"That's basically why I'm here, too. I mean, it doesn't make sense, now, does it? Much as I hate to admit it, I can see practically anyone I know fall in with Darkness, but I can't see them not making a decent effort to cover their tracks." 

Margaret nodded. "We were assuming someone was using Pucey to do just that. It could be anyone at the office, but Pucey was our point of focus, sort of. Now we've lost that lead, too. Whoever they are, I bet they'll stay away from him, even once he's cleared..." 

Bletchley sighed irritably. "Come on. You're the Department of bloody Mysteries, you must have at least some other lead " 

"Well, we intend to run a thaumic signature check on the most recent confirmation form and see if we've got a record on that one " 

Harriet interrupted her with a pat on the arm. "I think the first thing we should do is fetch Mack. Bet she's worried sick, what with us gone to meet a suspected Dark Witch." She smiled at Margaret. "Mr Bode, we'll get back to you once we've caught up with my colleague, alright?" The wizard nodded and terminated the connection. Harriet threw in some more powder. 

"Daily Prophet editorial office, Met Issues room." She turned to the others. "Back in a mo." 

When she'd disappeared among the flames, Flint to turned to Margaret. 

"Don't want to pry, Miss, but "Sharon"?" 

The young Unspeakable shrugged. "Thought it would make a good name for a receptionist. And then you said I looked like that one Shannon bird, and I remembered from somewhere she had a cousin called Sharon, so I said that was me. Seemed a good idea at the time." She sighed. "Dunno if I'm ready to deal hands-on with Death Eater activity, really I thought I would be, I mean, I felt sure I was before " She Summoned a chair and sat down heavily. 

The three of them waited in near-silence – the puffskeins' hum still reverberating around the Muffle charm that enclosed them – for Harriet to return. When she did, however, their relief turned to worry almost instantly. Flint was the first to speak. 

"What is it, Mills? Where's Ruby?" 

Harriet chewed her lip. "She's not at the office. Shannon says there was a private owl from what she supposed was "one of my sources". Seems like Mack left the note in question on my desk." 

Bletchley came forward. "Well? Where is it?" 

"Right here." Harriet held out her hand. On her palm lay a small pile of ashes. Margaret got up from her chair and peered closely at it. 

"Oh dear Self-destruct charm. Tricky, those. Whoever sent this really didn't want anyone but the recipient to know what was on there." 

Harriet fished a sheet of parchment from her pocket, tipped the ashes onto it, and folded it carefully around them. She turned to Margaret. 

"Think you'd better get back to Bode. Seems we'll need to get down to some serious signature checking, here." 

In a deserted corner of Weir Alley, in the two-street no man's land between the "good" and the more disreputable parts of town, a young witch tapped her wand on a patch of brick wall exposed amongst rusty garbage pails. Nothing happened. She tried again. Kept trying. Tried harder. Kept trying, harder. 

She was just about to try and blast the wall open herself when an urgent voice came from within. 

"Alright, alright, we've heard you! What do you want?" 

Ruby cleared her throat. "I have an appointment with Someone. I'm a friend of Harriet's." 

A slight pause. Ruby started playing with her sleeve. 

"Fair enough." 

The wall stirred, and some three rows of bricks shifted inward, then to the left. A pony-tailed wizard's face peered out from the opening, looking Ruby up and down carefully, then out into the street behind her, before stepping aside to let her in. After the wall had slid seamlessly shut again behind her, she waited for her eyes to adapt to the gloom before continuing down a narrow corridor, through a bead curtain and out into the Sleazy Kneazle. 

At this time of day, the Kneazle was used primarily as a site for conducting a very specific type of business deal. The bar and alcoves were littered with puffy wizards in their thirties and forties, wearing robes a tad too obviously expensive, gesturing wildly at one another and buying drinks for the young witches that lingered at their sides. Ruby made her way over to the only other witch lacking a male companion – the bartender, currently tending to a businesswizard who'd obviously had quite a few drinks already. She waited for her to finish her cocktail, then addressed her as politely as she could – doing quite well, considering the bartender's upper body appeared to only be covered by her own, knee-length black hair. 

"Er Excuse me? I'm looking for someone who would meet me here at four-thirty I'm with the Prophet." 

The bartender pushed a lock of hair out of her face and draped it carefully across her left breast. 

"Ah yes, he was here a few minutes ago. Told me to offer you this while you waited " 

She reached below the bar and resurfaced holding a bright green cocktail. The glass contained a tiny paper umbrella. Ruby stared at it. The bartender smiled. 

"Go on, take it. I'd have noticed if he'd tried to slip something of his own in along with the liquor. We don't hold with that sort of thing." Ruby smiled back at her and took the glass. She looked around. 

"Did he tell you where he'd go?" 

The bartender shook her head. "He said that he'd meet you again at 4.35 sharp, and that you'd best wait at that table over there till he does." She gestured at the nearest unoccupied alcove to Ruby's right. Ruby nodded, thanked her, and settled in the deep plush darkness of the alcove, gingerly sniffing her drink. She glanced at her watch. 4.34. Had he really left? Maybe he just wanted to observe her for a while, blending in among the other wizards in the club, before finally coming forward to introduce himself. But then why had he wanted her to wait in an alcove, where it would have been very hard for anyone out on the floor to even see if someone was sitting there in the first place? 

She took a small sip of her drink and played with the umbrella for a bit before glancing at her watch again. 4.35. He'd return any moment now. 

She was about to put the glass down and step out of the alcove to go and look for him herself when a strange, almost painful feeling spread through her stomach, like someone had clenched their fist around her insides. The next moment, it was tugging her upwards, into the air. She let go of the glass, at least, she tried to, but her fingers seemed stuck around it as she hurtled along some sort of swirling funnel, pulled onward by the glass, until she finally slammed down onto a plank floor. With a loud tinkle, the glass shattered. Instinctively, she reached for her camera, which she'd taken along in a pouch sewn into her robes. It seemed all right; she took it out and hung it around her neck before getting up and looking around. 

She appeared to have ended up in some sort of attic, a narrow space lit only by a single window at the far end of what seemed almost a corridor, flanked by sloping walls – a roof – that met over her head. The ground was littered with issues of the Daily Prophet. Quite recent issues they were, too – she recognised several cover photos as her own, outlining the devastation brought about by the last few weeks' DE raids. Something was wrong with some of the figures that would've normally scuttled busily across the images, though. She stooped to have a closer look, but dusk had set in, and she couldn't quite make out exactly what it was in what little daylight remained. She drew her wand and aimed it at the floor. 

"Lumos."

She blinked a few times in the sudden bright light of the torch spell, and glanced down.

The front cover shot before her was her infamous "unscathed cot" picture, the one taken at the Blooms' wrecked home, the one that had propelled Maynard & Harris into the public eye. The Auror standing guard at the door was twitching unnaturally, though, as if in pain. Ruby could see why, now; her face had been crossed out vigorously, with such violence that the paper had torn. In another picture, a male Auror's head had been burnt away entirely.

Ruby gasped and started toward the window. She had to get out

"Expelliarmus!"

Her wand slipped from her fingers and into the open palm of a wizard who seemed to have appeared out of nowhere – which, she thought to herself, was probably the case; most adult mages these days held Apparition licenses, after all. He shone the beam in her face and let out a nervous little laugh.

"You Should've known "

Ruby swallowed. "Me?"

The wizard's voice broke. "Should've known you'd come for me, too Should've known " He dropped her wand.

Ruby narrowed her eyes, peering at his face in the semi-darkness. Then, her jaw dropped.

"You "

"Well?"

Harriet had been pacing Bode’s office for the full ten minutes it had taken him to run a comparative signature check between the ashes of Ruby's note and the most recent confirmation of an order that had never been placed with Maynard & Harris. Now, she was leaning on his desktop with one hand, twirling her wand in the other. Her eyes, like those of the four others huddled around the desk, were focused on two sets of wavy patterns drifting around inside a containment bubble that hovered between them. Bletchley made a grab for her wand.

"Will you stop that? Someone might get hurt!"

Harriet glared back at her and casually aimed the wand at her chest. "You don't say..."

"Mills... Don't. We need to find Mack, quickly." Flint's hair was standing on end with the number of times he'd raked his calloused fingers through it. He turned to Bode. "Well? What can you tell from this?" He gestured at the faint lines floating overhead.

"Well, we now superimpose the two patterns..." The ministry official aimed his wand at the containment bubble and muttered a few phrases in what didn't quite sound like Latin. The lines drew together and coiled around one another.

"Now, if the patterns are similar, they will amplify each other, and the result will be a single pattern of double amplitude... If not, they will interfere and cancel each other out."

The five of them watched intently as the patterns smoothed themselves into a single wave, dipping and rising vigorously. Margaret was the first to speak.

"Looks like we have a winner, doesn't it?"

Harriet let out a sigh. "Yeah, well, we know Mack's gone to meet a supposed Death Eater, but we still don't know who it is, do we?"

Bode aimed his wand at the containment bubble once more. "I'll separate the patterns" – he muttered a short phrase, and the single wave split into two again – "then run duplicates of them through our database to see if there are any matches. If we get a match, I'll order a sweep of areas the mage in question has been known to frequent, and I'll order a hit squad to be sent to wherever a spell with this signature was last used."

Harriet nodded, and while Bode conjured up a series of known signatures within yet another containment bubble, she squinted at the confirmation form on his desk, stroking the parchment with her fingertips.

"Marcus? What's this?"

Flint came over and looked down at the form. "What's what?"

"This." She took his hand and trailed his fingers across the parchment. "D'you feel it?"

"Yeah " Flint's eyes narrowed; then, he smiled. "Oh, hang on, that's just the firm's watermark " He held the form against the light. "See?"

Harriet looked up. "Yeah, alright. But then, what are these?" She touched her finger to a blank section of the parchment, about halfway down the form. "These aren't part of the watermark, are they?" She took the form from him and held it horizontally, peering across the surface.

"See them? Those little indentations in the parchment?"

She handed the form back to Flint, reached into her pocket for a scroll of parchment and rubbed it carefully between her fingers. Her face fell.

"Too thick "

She turned to Bode, who was muttering non-stop as pattern after pattern drifted across the containment bubble, met up with the signature, and fell flat.

"Excuse me? Mr Bode? Do you think you could get me a really thin sheet of parchment?"

Bode gave her a rather vacant look, blinked, nodded and handed her a scroll from one of his desk drawers.

"There you are, Ms Mills, 4 grams per square foot. Anything else?"

Harriet unrolled the scroll. "Perhaps a 2B pencil, if you have one..."

Bode regarded her quizzically, but shrugged and mumbled, "Accio 2B," handing her the neatly sharpened pencil that landed in his hand. She thanked him and took parchment, pencil, a clipboard off his desk and the confirmation form to the windowsill, where she sat down, pulling her knees up for support.

Flint and Bletchley joined her as she carefully clamped the empty sheet of parchment on top of the form on the clipboard. Bletchley peered at the parchment and pencil. "Didn't know you drew, Mills."

Harriet cocked her head. "Oldest trick in the book, really. Doesn't involve magic in any way. Maybe that's why they overlooked it."

"Overlooked what?" Bletchley sat down next to her, looking over her shoulder. Flint leant against the windowsill to her other side. Harriet lifted the parchment to reveal the form beneath it.

"When you write something on the top sheet of a stack of paper, the ink may not transfer to the one beneath it, but the path that your quill traces tends to press into the next sheet pretty hard. Hard enough for someone who only has the second sheet to figure out what was on the top one. What you do is" – here she demonstrated – "you place a thin, blank sheet on top of the one you have, then gently rub a pencil across it, and all writing will reappear in white on gray. All of the writing, not just what you can see in ink. Hang on, I think I'm getting something..."

As Harriet sat in the windowsill, swiftly dragging pencil across parchment, Margaret stood staring intently at the containment field over Bode's desk. He was on the second-to-last pattern in the Department's database, now. The two signatures came together, merged, and went dead. No match. Margaret's hands shook slightly while her supervisor called up their very last possibility. Two waves, then one. Then nothing.

Nothing. They had no leads. She slowly let out her breath as Bode terminated the containment charm and sat back in his chair. Don't panic. Or, at the very least, don't let anyone know when you do.

At the same moment, however, a decanter that had been sitting on Bode's mantelpiece across his office shattered in a rain of crystal and brandy, and two voices at the window swore almost simultaneously. And quite eloquently, at that. Margaret looked up. Bletchley was staring at the clipboard in Harriet's hands, shaking her head. Flint had started pacing up and down the office, muttering phrases Margaret only caught snatches of as she and Bode made their way over to the windowsill.

"Murtlap-buggering bastard... Gonna ram his fucking quills straight..."

Margaret pushed past him as inoffensively as she could and turned to Harriet. "What is it?"

Harriet shrugged, then showed her the clipboard. The top sheet had been painstakingly covered in faint pencil, against which the writing on the confirmation form beneath it stood out in white.

The writing, and a rather risqué portrait of the plump young witch who had come to see Marcus Flint earlier that day.

At the far end of the office, Flint raked both hands through his hair, shaking with rage.

"Jackson, you wanker..."

"You... You brought me here? The glass... It was a portkey, wasn't it? Set to 4.35."

The mousy wizard from Accounts nodded.

"Why?" Ruby gestured at the Daily Prophets heaped up around her on the floor. "I can see you're upset, but what happened to those people is really none of my fault, honestly. I just took the pictures afterwards..."

"You led them to me." The wizard's voice was shaking. "Your photos made them find me."

"Who? Who found you?" She looked down at an Auror's mutilated image. "The Aurors? You think I set the Aurors on you?"

Jackson started pacing the room. "I saw them in the paper, and they saw me. They'd found me. Now they come for me at night, they yell at me, they hex me, they hurt me... They whisper names and dates and places... And then I read the paper, and they're there, with the names and the dates and the places, looking up at me... I try to stop them looking at me, make them look away, but they still come for me at night... Every night, more pain. More names..."

Ruby's shock and amazement were slowly turning to panic. The man was out of his mind. She couldn't possibly handle this all by herself. She needed help. Scrap that – he needed help. But how could she get past him without her wand? He had both hers and his own.

Keep him talking. Try to reason with him, find out as much as you can, then tell him what he wants to hear...

She cleared her throat. "What do you want me to do?"

Jackson stopped dead. "They think they can taunt me with names and dates and places." He waggled a finger in front of her face. "I stopped them, though." He gave a shrill chuckle.

"I took the names, and the places, I took them all in, put them down on parchment, filed them where they'd be safe... And when I next saw them all in the paper, they were there, the places and the dates – but not the names. No! They didn't get the names in the paper like they'd wanted to..."

Ruby opened her mouth hesitantly, closed it, then tried again.

"So... You wrote the names from your dreams down on parchment, so they wouldn't go in the papers along with the pictures of the Aurors?"

Jackson nodded fervently. "Oh yes! I filled them all in, and then I signed the right name to it, so no one would know, and everyone would be safe."

"The right name? Not yours, then?" Then whose name would he...

Realisation hit her like a Bludger.

"You created those ward accounts? For all those DE victims? Signed with Pucey's name?"

Jackson nodded dolefully. "But they found him, too. They've taken him away... I can't take down any more names." He looked her in the eyes. "That's why you have to make them go away."

"Me?" Ruby broke out in a cold sweat. "I can't... I don't know how I could possibly..."

The wild-eyed wizard strode over to her and grabbed her wrists; she whimpered softly as he gave her a pleading look.

"You have to... If you don't, there'll be so many more names in the paper... I can't bear their laughter, what they do when they come for me at night... You have to make them go away!"

Ruby broke free and made for the window, staggering back when she saw just how high up they really were. She had to get her wand back. She turned.

Jackson had come after her, and now stood eyeing the camera that hung around her neck, its lens glinting in the sparse light of a newly-risen moon. He pointed a shaking finger at it, then spoke, with a terrible conviction.

"They're in there, aren't they? Of course they are! They live in there, then crawl out through your pictures and into my head at night..."

He made a grab for her camera, but Ruby ducked under his arm, and the young wizard went crashing through and out the window. Ruby shrieked and grabbed hold of his right boot as his weight dragged her with it until she was hanging halfway between the building and thin air, her knees wedged firmly beneath the window-frame, broken glass cutting through four layers of cloth into her belly. Beneath her fingers, she could feel Jackson's foot slowly starting to shift against the leather, slipping from her grasp...

"There they are!"

A bright light shone in her face, followed by a series of gasps and yells as Jackson's single-booted body started plummeting toward the ground. Ruby tried not to look down, but found she couldn't take her eyes off the wizard's flailing figure as it steadily closed in on, then hit, the street below.

And bounced like a Quaffle. Five times.

"Told you they could hold for up to a month! I cast that ward, what, two weeks ago? Bounce, baby, bounce! Haha!"

Flint, Bletchley, Harriet, Margaret and Bode had met up with Ratcliffe's hit squad on Prime Alley just in time to witness Jackson's remarkable, bouncy survival of a forty-foot fall, getting off with what appeared to be no more than a minor concussion. Flint was now practically bouncing himself, having already given everyone in sight a crushing bear hug, punching the air and letting out the occasional battle cry. Bletchley hadn't seen him like this since the last year she'd played for their House team – which, incidentally, had also been the last year they'd won the Hogwarts Quidditch Cup.

She grinned back at her former team Captain and sidled over to Ruby, who was being given first aid by a properly qualified Auror, while Ratcliffe himself looked on.

"Hey." She smiled awkwardly. "Gave us all a fright, there, you did."

Ruby chuckled, then breathed in sharply as the Ministry wizard fused a cut just above her navel. "Not half as frightening as feeling him slip from my fingers like that. Never mind seeing him fall "

Bletchley grimaced. "Don't see why you bothered at all. Bloody bastard tried to frame our Ade, didn't he?"

Ruby shook her head. "I don't think he knew exactly what he was doing. Pretty far gone, that one, I'd say. Seemed to think the Aurors in my pictures came for him at night to torture him and tell him who'd be next attacked by Death Eaters. He said he was trying to trick the Forces of Darkness by creating accounts for them with the firm."

Ratcliffe clucked his tongue thoughtfully. "He was spot-on with the victims, though, wasn't he, most of the time?"

Bletchley shrugged. "My guess is he really is a DE, and the Aurors he says he dreams about are just his conscience. Like, he forged those confirmations to soothe his conscience, and feel good about trying to limit the damage and suffering he and his buddies inflict on others." She tapped her temple with a meaningful nod. "Psychology, that. 's Called projection."

"Could be. Anyway, we've got him properly locked away, now. The Department will get this sorted sooner or later."

"Did you arrest him?" Ruby asked, frowning.

"Yes, of course we did, as soon as we'd determined he had no serious injuries," Ratcliffe replied, rather irritably. "What do you think we should have done, given him a cookie?"

Ruby looked rather worried. "It's just, he seemed really paranoid about Aurors just now, crossing out their faces in my pictures and everything, so they wouldn't look back at him. Did he resist arrest at all?"

Ratcliffe shook his head. "Didn't seem to mind it."

"And he didn't seem afraid of your people, or unwilling to go near them?"

Again, Ratcliffe shook his head. "He let them take his arms, no problem... Crossed 'em out in your pictures, you said? So they wouldn't look at him? Perhaps we should take a look at those ourselves. Wurttemberg?"

A gangly hit wizard came sidling over to Ratcliffe. Bletchley thought he looked like a puppy with a severe head cold.

"Sir?"

"Have you collected those Prophet clippings? I'd like to have a look at them."

Wurttemberg sidled away, then reappeared with a folder, which he handed to his superior before discreetly disappearing again.

"Now, let's have a look at that neurosis..." Ratcliffe started leafing through the clippings, entire sections, and torn-out pages of the Prophet that his squad had collected. "Here – this one hasn't been crossed out... And that's Keats, he hasn't touched her either. Oh, here's one." He peered closely at the twitching figure standing in the doorway to what was left of the Blooms' nursery. "Simmons, if I remember correctly... Put her on watch there that day. And another one – yes, that's her, Simmons crossed out again." Ratcliffe's frown deepened with every picture he put aside for further investigation. Finally, he closed the folder and handed it to the hit wizard who'd just finished dressing Ruby's wounds.

"Seems the only Aurors Jackson didn't want looking at him were Simmons and Wurttemberg."

Bletchley looked over at the young wizard who stood staring back at them in the middle of the road, unmoving. Ratcliffe followed her glance and called out to him.

"Walter... Could you come here for a minute? I'd like to see you and Sandra about something."

For a few more seconds, Wurttemberg remained motionless. Then he got moving in a direction that was definitely not the Inspector's – he actually seemed to be heading for a lamppost against which a number of Ministry brooms had been parked. Bletchley nudged Ruby.

"Got a broom? You played Keeper, right?"

Ruby nodded. Ratcliffe took the Mediwizard's Cleansweep and thrust it into her hands.

"Good." Bletchley mounted her Nimbus. "Looks like we got one here we really don't want to get past us."

Wurttemberg kicked off seconds before either of the witches, but in his frantic efforts to accelerate, one of his hands slipped off the handle, and he veered to the right in a wide circular motion that landed him on a collision course with Ruby, who'd been right behind him. He braked with all his might and did a full turn, setting off in the opposite direction with the former Huflepuff Keeper on his bristles. After a few more seconds, it seemed he'd be able to shake her off – he'd picked the Inspector's Nimbus 2001, after all, and she only had a Cleansweep – and he leant forward on the handle, elbows pressed to his sides to reduce drag.

The very next moment, however, his hands and knees were clasped around thin air, and the only thing that was keeping him airborne was a small but determined fist clutched tightly around his collar. Bletchley was hanging on to her Nimbus with her left hand and knee, steering awkwardly toward the ground, her right leg scrabbling for purchase on the handle. Thank Merlin she'd decided to wear leggings under her robes that day.

"Thank you, Miss Bletchley, we'll take it from here. Expelliarmus!"

Gratefully, she let go and touched down beside Ratcliffe, who'd disarmed the rather dazed young Auror, and was now performing an Upper Body Bind. As she stood massaging some life back into the fingers of her right hand, Flint's awesome growl reverberated across the street.

"Did you fucking see that? A bloody starfish at ninety miles an hour..."

He came running towards her, broom in hand, Harriet and Margaret following closely.

"Pure fucking poetry, that..." He seemed speechless for a moment, then cupped his hands around her face and looked her straight in the eyes. "You are the light of my fucking life, Karen, do you know that?"

Harriet turned to Margaret in a loud stage whisper. "D'you think we should leave them alone for a bit?"

Bletchley brushed Flint's hands off and looked around, mildly concerned. "We're not there yet, people. There was another one. Name of..."

"Simmons!"

Ratcliffe was looking up at the rising figure of a hit witch Harriet and Ruby had seen at the site of many a DE attack over the past few weeks. She'd taken off in a southward direction along Prime Alley, but Ruby was still hovering in the gap between lamp posts, subtly countering her moves as she tried to break through, first by pulling up, then by diving.

"She's really not gonna budge, is she?" Bletchley whispered; the two witches now hung motionlessly opposite one another about ten feet overhead.

"Nope She's gonna have to boot her aside or try something different altogether." Flint was squinting in the lamplight, his right hand casually open over the Nimbus at his feet. "Create a diversion, like Hang on. What's she doing now?"

Simmons leant back on her broom, clearing her throat noisily.

Bletchley grimaced. "Sounds like she's gonna try and gob her way through "

The hit witch spat at Ruby, slightly to her right, then swerved after it, clearly expecting her opponent to move out of the sticky missile's way. She didn't, however, and as the wad of spit landed on Ruby's shoulder, Simmons made a sharp turn and headed north, to an opening a few feet over the Inspector's head.

"Oh no you don't! UP!" Flint kicked off, with both feet, before he'd even properly mounted his Nimbus, swinging his right leg over the handle at full speed, a move that steered him off course and away from Simmons, yards to her left. He leant heavily to the left, coming round and up at top speed, closing in, until he had actually passed her, still flying a few feet below and to her left.

Harriet gave Bletchley's sleeve a frantic tug. "What's he think he's doing up there?"

Bletchley smiled faintly. "I think I know. You might want to keep a Medimage handy." She sighed and shook her head. "Skinner, you fucking nutcase, you..."

Simmons seemed to have noticed Flint tailing her below, and accelerated. As if he'd seen it coming, Flint shot up almost vertically, hunching his shoulders, leaning to the right.

Bracing for impact.

With a thud that was audible from the ground, Flint slammed into Simmons, who shrieked and made a grab for his robes as she toppled off her broom, pulling him along. He hung on to his broom with his left hand, steering downward and back to the remainder of Ratcliffe's squad as well as he could while Simmons fumbled for her wand. At about seven feet from the ground, he let go.

Simmons broke both Flint's fall and his nose as she landed flat on her back, whimpering with pain but clinging to her wand until Ratcliffe finally managed to disarm her. Flint sat up, blinking vaguely. Blood trickled from both his nostrils. Ruby skidded to a halt a few feet away while Bletchley and Harriet came running over. He gazed up at them with a blissful grin.

"Fucking hell..." He gingerly put a hand to his upper lip, looked at it, and licked the blood from his fingers as his grin widened ever further. "That was a good one..."

Bletchley's eyes narrowed. "You're one sick bastard, Skinner."

"Yeah... That's why you love me, innit? Ah, shit..." He screwed his eyes shut and leant to the side, dry-retching violently. The wizard who'd dressed Ruby's cuts scuttled over to him and squatted down, motioning the witches to move along, nothing to see here. Ruby shrugged, looking from Harriet to Bletchley, and frowned.

"Hang on – where's Margaret?"

Bode, who was panting slightly from trying to keep up with everything as it happened, came scampering over to them.

"Don't worry about Miss Puddifoot... She's just received orders for her next assignment. It would be best if as little people as possible knew where she is headed."

Ruby pulled a face. "Doesn't she ever get a day off?"

Bode shrugged. "What can I say? Witches with her... capacities for blending in are hard to find. We need her."

"Sir?" Harriet was chewing her lip thoughtfully. "Are you quite sure this is it?"

"Excuse me?"

Harriet sighed. "Are you sure there'll be no more daring attempts at escape from hitherto unsuspected baddies?"

* * * * *

"Poor Derek..."

Ruby was pushing her periwinkle petal pasta around on her plate. She wasn't very hungry; her stomach already seemed pretty full of all that had happened that day. She mused that perhaps she should get herself abducted by spell-shocked accountants more often; it might lose her a few pounds on the way.

"Couldn't he just have gone to the Aurors about it?"

Pucey was staring into his butterbeer. His ninth, if she'd counted correctly; they'd been celebrating his release from custody, then moved on to a celebration of the fact that she'd managed to get a prime shot of Flint knocking out Simmons, once she'd wiped her lens down. She felt sure Flint's return from the Prophet's office – he'd gone to see Magda, who seemed to be the only Medimage he really trusted, about his shoulder – would be reason enough to launch another little party.

Harriet perked up at the opportunity for some serious evaluation.

"Ah " She waggled a finger. "But he couldn't remember what had happened, what with the Memory Charm and everything. He had no recollection of overhearing them, or what they did to him afterwards. Whatever came back to him when he saw Mack's shots only surfaced at night. I mean, think about it " She shifted, glancing round to make sure she had everyone's full attention.

"You're a regular wizard, right? Cushy job in Accounts and everything. OK, so you have the odd pint down the pub now and again, and last night's events might become a bit blurry the morning after, but nothing you'd say a cup of coffee and a shower couldn't fix. Then one day, you read about this DE raid in the papers, and you start having horrific dreams about a couple of Aurors hexing and cursing the crap out of you, yelling names that crop up in raid reports the next day, together with pictures of those very same Aurors. Pretty creepy, I'd say, even without spellshock paranoia creeping up on you in the mean time."

"Will he be alright?" Ruby had given up on her pasta, and was trying to warm her hands around her mug of Honey from Heaven. Harriet shrugged.

"They told me they can't be sure yet, no one can tell how he'll react to treatment. We can only hope for the best." She grimaced.

Bletchley, who'd been silently staring at the door for most of the evening, finally spoke up.

"What I don't get is, why didn't they kill him? That would've been the most effective way to shut him up, I'd say."

"Not if people had seen them together. In that case, them being Aurors, they could either set him up to make it look like he was resisting arrest, then fatally curse him in self-defence, or perform a Memory Charm and keep their fingers crossed. Seems they opted for the latter." She scowled. "Can't believe I didn't see any of it coming. Must be losing my touch or something "

Pucey snorted and reached for a plate of red herring on toast. "Hey, if anyone should have seen anything coming, it would have been me, OK? I worked with him." He fell silent. "Actually, I didn't do that much work, really." With a loud groan, he buried his head in his hands. "Merlin, he could've tried to tip me off a dozen times, and I'd have just thought he was pestering me about my coffee breaks..."

Ruby noisily slurped her coffee. "What are you going to do now? About work, I mean?"

"They've offered me their sincerest apologies for the whole thing, plus a sackful of Galleons, saying they'd understand completely if I chose to leave. In other words, they told me to get my creepy Slytherin arse out of their office. Don't blame 'em, either."

"Oh, come on!" Ruby seemed rather shocked. "You had nothing to do with what Jackson was doing! And what he did wasn't even his fault, either, really."

"Well, I've never been much of an asset to the firm, have I? And can you imagine the scandal if Simmons and Wurttemberg hadn't been found out? Derek would have been a security firm employee with prior knowledge of oncoming DE raids. Me being Slytherin, who'd have believed I wasn't in on any of it? Just think of the implications, for the firm, for anyone either of us ever worked with. Mills and yourself could have got into six feet of shite for associating with us. As for Skinner – sorry, Marcus – he'd have been absolutely fucked, what with the enemies he's made thus far..."

"Speak of the devil..." Bletchley murmured. The door to Talbot's swung open, and a rather ruffled Flint made his way over to their table. Pucey knocked over his chair in his efforts to get up, and threw his arms around him. Bletchley and Harriet followed in a scramble of pats on backs and one-on-one hugs. Flint growled in protest.

"Mind the arm, will you!" He backed off, gingerly flexing his right shoulder. Pucey grinned.

"You're a fucking head case, Skinner, d'you know that? How's your shoulder?"

Flint shrugged, carefully. "Bit stiff."

"I'm sure Bletchley'll give you a back rub, if you ask her nicely." Ruby smiled sweetly at them from her seat. Bletchley glared; Harriet drew up an extra chair and beckoned the three Slytherins back to their table. Flint settled in between Pucey and Bletchley. Pucey reached into his sleeve for his purse.

"What are you all having? I'm buying – should've got some credit back with my old man after what happened today... Over here!" He beckoned one of the sullen, gum-chewing waitresses the regulars at Talbot's had come to know and learn to endure. This one – "Anne", her tag read – looked strangely familiar, though. Pucey looked up at her as she reached for her pad and DictaQuill, and frowned.

"Don't I know you from somewhere?"

The waitress rolled her eyes. "Do you honestly think you'll ever actually pull with lines like that? Great Merlin..." She sighed and silently took down their order. Pucey went rather pink and looked down at the tabletop, missing out on the secretive wink Margaret gave the others before taking their order back to the bar.

After another drink or two, Harriet reached for her cloak. Pucey lifted an eyebrow.

"Not staying for dinner, then, Mills?"

Harriet sighed. "I'd love to, honestly, but Auntie needs feeding."

Pucey's other eyebrow joined the first. "Auntie?"

Ruby smiled. "Aunt Beast. Her kneazle. Great judge of character. Took a liking to Marcus right away."

Bletchley snorted. "How can she be a good judge of character, then?"

Flint jabbed a finger into her side, and she doubled over, chuckling. "C'mon, Skinner, that was too good a pass not to try and score." She called after Harriet. "So you're just going to leave us, then, Mills? Just like that?"

Harriet turned around at the door. "Well... There is one more thing."

Ruby pulled on her cloak during the short silence that followed. She sensed a one liner coming up.

Harriet cocked her head. "It's been emotional."

Ruby shook her head, smiling, and followed Harriet to the door. When it had closed behind them, Pucey got up as well. Bletchley made a grab for his sleeve.

"Hang on – Ade, where do you think you're going?"

"Taking a leak. If you don't mind." He folded his arms expectantly. She kicked him in the shins.

"Piss artist. Go on, then."

He ruffled her hair before disappearing through the door marked "Wizards" towards the end of the bar. There was a brief silence before Flint took a deep breath and turned to Bletchley.

"It's days like these that make me wonder where it all went wrong, Karen."

She gave him a sufficiently vacant stare. He continued.

"Stuff like that little stunt today – makes me realise just how much I miss Quidditch. Makes me wonder if I'm living the right life, you know? And if I'm not, whether it's too late to change."

Bletchley considered this carefully.

"I bet Quidditch players don't get round to saving people's lives on a regular basis, now, do they?"

Flint smiled wanly. "Yeah, alright, I am doing the right thing with my life. I'm just a bit confused, you know? Back when I was seventeen, I had it all figured out. There was me, there was Quidditch, and there was you. Like " He gestured vaguely. "Like one of them trinities. And then a couple of months later, we weren't winning anymore, I'd failed my Advanced sodding Charms NEWT, and you'd gone and dumped me. I felt like a fucking Squib at a Sorting Ceremony.

"Stuff sort of Sinks after a while, it always does, and you carry on, try something else, and it all seems fine. But then something happens, and all that shit from before comes bobbing right up again, and all of a sudden you do know what you're missing. And it fucking hurts.

"I really miss you, Karen."

She blinked. "You mean you missed me. Before today."

He shook his head. "No, I miss you. It wasn't so bad before today, 'cause you weren't around, and things had sunk all the way down, sort of. But now you're back, and... It's like with magnets, right? The closer you get, the more you feel you need to get even closer."

A pause. Bletchley chewed her lip.

"What about the Huffy? Don't tell me you're not into her."

Flint leant back and raked a hand through his hair. "Well... Yeah, I am. Thing is, she'll never get it, will she? She might at some point get interested in the workings of the Slytherin mind and all that, instead of running from it as fast as she can, the way she does now. Still, no one from any of the other Houses will ever really get what we're about, will they? Eh?"

Bletchley shrugged. Flint leant forward in his seat to look her in the eyes.

"There's always going to be things you want. 'Specially if you're Slytherin. But there's also things you need." He grimaced apologetically. "First and foremost, I'd say I need you, Karen."

He pushed a lock of hair out of her eyes and stuck it behind her ear. His fingers trailed down her neck before her hand shot up and yanked his head back by the hair.

"You're one slick bastard, Skinner "

As the door to the Wizards' opened and Pucey came back out, Talbot's runic sound system launched into a song that had rung out through Muggle Britain since the start of summer.

Turn left... Turn right...

Pucey grinned widely and rushed back to his seat.

"Didn't know they played Radio Electric at this place... Got the album at home, actually, it's got Paul Cook from the Sex Pistols on it... Oh." He stopped dead.

At the end of the bench that had been seating the three of them, Flint and Bletchley sat huddled together in a heartfelt if clumsy collision of tongues and teeth.

You gave me just a taste, so I want more... 

For a while, Pucey stood beside the table, among fuzzy guitars, an insistent bass line and deep vocals that seemed to long to break free from the melody and wander off by themselves.

Now you've got me crawling, crawling on the floor...

Finally, he shrugged, took his cloak, and made for the door, humming and tapping his fingers against his thigh.

And I've never known a girl like you before...

Shaking his head, he closed the door on his friends and Edwyn Collins. He'd just have to Floo Terry Higgs to properly sort things out in his mind. This had been one weird day. Bloody exhausting, too.