Transcendence

St. Mungo's had the same off-white walls and bland floor tiles as any other hospital Tom had ever seen. He'd have thought that wizards would try to make it a bit more inviting and bit less sterile.

It stirred up anger and helplessness in him that he'd thought were long since forgotten. Tom had only been four, maybe five, the last time he'd been in a Muggle hospital; he'd discovered shortly afterward that he could control his magic, and he hadn't been vulnerable after that. He hadn't thought about it since he was eleven and the Hogwarts nurse had fixed the bone that hadn't quite healed properly under the substandard Muggle care the orphanage had been able to afford him.

Now Tom could almost feel the ache in the wrist, like a phantom pain, and he scowled for just a moment before wiping his expression blank again. He was here to permanently drive Molly Weasley insane, not to relive moments of childhood weakness.

He refocused on his surroundings. He didn't think that anybody would recognize him, but there were bound to be a few Mediwizards or support staff members who had known him as a student, so he couldn't be too careful. As a Horcrux, no ordinary magic that was supposed to alter his vessel could take hold of him--just like his diary had been protected from water damage when little Ginny had thrown him into the toilet, his body now was protected from physical damage as well. Unfortunately, Horcrux magic tended not to discriminate between things like Burning Charms and Slicing Hexes, and things like Polyjuice Potion and Transfigurations.

He was stuck doing things the Muggle way. He'd let his hair fall across his forehead rather than arranging it properly, and he was wearing a Gryffindor-scarlet sweater and keeping his face ducked down while he slouched his shoulders. It was unlikely that anyone who had gone to school with hi would recognize him, besides his own Knights, and anyone who did happen to notice him would probably think, at most, that Tom Riddle must have somehow ended up with a shy grandson after he'd fallen off the face of the earth fifty years ago.

And Draco had verified earlier that morning, during breakfast, that Dumbledore had been at the school. It was unlikely that he would have left to visit St. Mungo's since then.

All in all, Tom figured that his plan would go off without a hitch.

The wizarding world was even less equipped to deal with psychological maladies than the Muggle world--that was probably why nobody had recognized anything odd about Tom when he'd arrived from the orphanage, and why nobody had thought to see to Harry Potter's mental wellbeing despite all he had experienced and his frequent adventures that Tom could only assume were poorly executed suicide attempts. As such, there was no wing or floor dedicated to psychiatric cases.

Mrs. Weasley had been placed on the fourth floor, in a double room next to the Janice Thickey ward, which housed patients whose minds had been seriously addled by spell damage. She had covered her side of the shared room in all sorts of knitted things and homemade quilts, in case Tom needed another reason to want to torture her and then kill her.

And hadn't she been from a good pureblood family before she'd married the blood traitor? Tom had always striven to have better and more of everything, whether he'd had to steal, cheat, lie, torture, or kill to get it. And Molly Prewett had given up a relatively comfortable life and the chance to barter her pure blood in marriage to someone who could have given her anything she wanted, just so she could spend her life knitting tea cozies? It was unfathomable.

He could remember that poor Ginny had wanted more than her family had been able to give her. She'd had the misfortune of dreaming about Harry Potter, of course (not to mention the misfortune of trusting Tom), so she hadn't shown much better judgment than her mother. Tom wondered whether any of her siblings had similar aspirations of greatness and made a mental note to ask Draco about the other Weasley children.

Molly was propped up in an uncomfortable looking chair just inside the door, surrounded by yarn in various dull oranges and browns. He couldn't imagine why--those colors did nothing for her hair or complexion, or anybody else's for that matter. She took his sudden appearance in her room in stride, at least. His deliberately boyish appearance did have that advantage. She tried to smile, a pitiful thing that was brittle around the edges.

"Hello, dear. Are you here for poor Mrs. Nettles?" They both looked at the woman in the bed on the far side of the room. Her head was lolling against her pillow, and though her eyes were open she didn't seem to see anything. Molly sighed and leaned forward to pat Tom's hand. "Well, I'm sure she would appreciate it, dear, if she were in her right mind."

Tom thought that Molly Weasley had even less tact than Draco Malfoy, which was rather sad given that she was actually trying to be comforting.

He struck like a snake, shooting his hand out to wrap his longer fingers around her retreating wrist. She tried to gasp, but the breath seemed to get trapped somewhere in her throat so that it came out as a sad, strangled kind of sound. He leaned down so that he was level with her and caught her gaze in his.

"I'm here for you."

"For me?" she choked out.

Molly had once been a formidable woman; Tom had always gotten that impression from Ginny's stories of her family, and he could see it now hidden somewhere in the ruins of her half-broken mind. He was determined to trample on even the ruins of anything she used to be.

He smiled.

"You see, Molly, you were the last thing your daughter thought about. She was so sorry, and she wanted so badly for you to know that."

The woman made a strangled, wounded sound from the back of her throat. "Ginny?"

And then Tom was inside her mind, and everything that had happened with her daughter was playing out with all the perfect detail of Tom's memory.

"Pansy Parkinson made fun of my secondhand robes today, and all the Slytherin girls and even some of the Ravenclaws laughed. I was so ashamed, Tom!"

"No one's ever understood me like you, Tom."

A girl in a threadbare nightgown walked barefoot across the wet grass, the moonlight catching the copper in her hair so that had somebody only looked they would have seen her. But nobody saw her or heard her, and then her small hands wrapped around the first rooster's throat and Tom knew he had complete control.

"Dear Tom, I think I'm losing my memory. There are rooster feathers all over my robes and I don't know how they got there."

The Weasley girl had to lean up on her tiptoes and reach as high as she could until her arms and stomach stretched uncomfortably with the effort, but she managed to get the cat stuck up on the wall sconce above her head.

"There was another attack today and I don't know where I was. Tom, what am I going to do? I think I'm going mad . . . I think I'm the one attacking everyone, Tom!"

"It's you! It's always been you! What have you done to me?!"

"Why, Tom? Just stop, please... Tom, please. Why are you doing this to me?"

But even though she stopped writing in the diary--even though she wrapped it in the old nightgown that had been covered in paint and shoved it down into the deepest, darkest corner of her trunk and tried to forget about it--she couldn't escape. She took the diary out of its hiding place and carried it with her, holding it close to her chest with one arm while she used her other hand to write the message of her own demise.

Her skeleton will lie in the Chamber forever.

"Wha--where--?" She looked around wildly, eyes growing wider with every passing moment and every new stone she saw. She spun so quickly that she nearly lost her balance, but she came up just short when she saw him. "Who are... Tom?"

Tom smiled for the first time in fifty years. Well, to be fair, it was the first time he'd been corporeal at all for that long.

"Hello, Ginny."

She knew enough to be terrified but not enough to fear him as much as she should. Or perhaps that was just her Gryffindor bravery. "Tom... why did you bring me here? You have to let me go!"

"I can't do that," he replied evenly. He could feel her essence flowing slowly but steadily into him from the connection he'd so carefully crafted between them since over the long months. But it wasn't enough, not yet.

"Let me go! Please let me go! I won't tell anyone, I swear, just please let me--"

"Oh, Gin," he said almost softly as he let his ghostly, partly corporeal fingers grasp her shoulders, "I will never let you go."

She didn't have time to respond before he closed the distance between them and pressed his icy mouth to her slack lips. He had not been at all certain that it would work, but surely if that was how Dementors did it then there must be something to the whole kissing thing. Fortunately, it seemed to come to him almost naturally; he couldn't say now, looking back on it, exactly how he'd done it, but he had felt her soul fluttering inside of her and had gathered it to himself just as easily as he had always gathered his magic inside his own body.

It was rather painful, actually. Seemingly more so for Tom than for Ginny.

When he finally couldn't take it anymore--seconds, minutes, maybe hours later--he pulled back with a gasp that didn't quite catch in his half-formed lungs and let her limp body fall to the Chamber floor. It wasn't complete, not yet. He could still feel just the slightest tendrils connecting his soul to the girl's, and connecting his body with the diary. But he could feel those connections lessening with every passing second. Now he only had to wait for Harry Potter to come, as he knew the boy would.

When Tom pulled back from Molly Weasley, her eyes were almost a perfect mirror of how Ginny's had looked when the girl had realized that she was going to die.

He had been worried, at least on some level, that Molly would fight back or be consumed with the need for revenge and regain some of her spark, and then he would have had to change his whole plans around and he would have been quite irritated. Fortunately everything went as he had hoped, and the woman sagged bonelessly in her chair and stared forward with sightless eyes.

"Ginny..." she moaned. "Oh, my Ginny... Dead. Dead dead dead."

"Oh, Ginny isn't dead, Mrs. Weasley."

She gasped and her eyes seemed to regain their focus. They were full of such hope and longing that it made Tom want to vomit. "Not... not dead?"

Tom took a seat on the footstool resting in front of Molly's chair, taking a moment to situate himself comfortably and brush his hair out of his eyes before he looked back into her face.

"No, not dead at all. Ginny can never die," he said matter-of-factly. Molly leaned forward until they were only a half a foot apart, and Tom could smell the mixture of Calming Draught and mint that lingered on her breath. She made a wordless sound from the very center of herself, and Tom patted her knee kindly and offered a sympathetic expression. "Of course she can't. I took her soul."

Molly screamed so loudly that it probably would have hurt Tom's ears had he been human and not just a physical manifestation of a Horcrux inhabiting a vessel created using the soul and magical essence of the woman's only daughter. Undoubtedly the hospital staff would have come running had he not completely shielded the room beforehand. Mrs. Nettles jolted in her bed, but her eyes were no more lucid than they had been before.

Tom patted Molly's knee again while he carefully aimed his wand at her temple.

"Oh, sure," he continued calmly so that he had her full attention on himself and not on what he was doing with his wand, "her body expired, what with it lying in the Chamber for so long, but that hardly matters because it hadn't, you know, had anything inside it." He chuckled once, then glanced up from the clock to frown at her. "Well, even if you cannot appreciate what I am saying, surely you can appreciate this."

He reached towards the table between her chair and her bed and picked up her clock so that she could see. If it were possible, she went even paler than before.

Tom set it back on the table from whence it had come and leaned back to admire his handiwork. "Now it's more accurate, you see. Ginny isn't 'Dead,' but she is in 'Eternal Torment.'"

Naturally he was making it all up as he went along. Tom knew not a thing about souls other than that they could be used to make Horcruxes and to bring Horcruxes back to some semblance of life. It was entirely likely that poor little Ginny had ceased to exist when Tom had taken her soul, or that even if she did exist it was not any form of conscious existence. But it all worked out so much better if Molly spent the rest of her days seeing that her daughter was in Eternal Torment.

Only Molly could see that on the clock, of course. It was just an illusion created in her mind. In the same part of her mind, in fact, where his presence and their entire conversation and everything he had shown her from his memories were locked away so that nobody else would ever be able to find them except for Molly herself, who would no doubt spend most of her time dwelling on them.

He couldn't have fiddled with the clock itself, because her friends or family or Healers might have eventually noticed that it had been tampered with. But her mind was already such a mess, and he was skilled enough at mind manipulation, that he would be beyond surprised if anybody ever figured out what had happened.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The civil trial of Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy, on behalf of their son Draco, against Rubeus Hagrid and Albus Dumbledore began on a chilly Tuesday morning in the beginning of October. Tom wished desperately that he could go, but he knew that it would be impossible to disguise himself well enough that Dumbledore wouldn't recognize him, even in a crowded courtroom.

Being a Horcrux was a bit of a disadvantage sometimes after all.

Lucius assured him that it would be rather boring anyway. The trial was only about whether Hagrid had been reckless in allowing third years to handle hippogriffs, and whether Dumbledore had been negligent in hiring and supervising Hagrid. The investigative hearings and possible criminal charges would come later, after the Malfoys won this trial and set the stage for them.

Malfoy had carefully choreographed all of it for maximum effectiveness.

Tom spent a few hours in the library meticulously designing complex runes, but at some point he had to acknowledge that he was too restless to trust himself to do the job properly. He briefly considered going out and collecting a new plaything--he was really missing his old Muggle one since he'd accidentally killed it--but he decided that he wouldn't have time to properly enjoy it after Voldemort showed up.

He was getting impatient to visit both Hogwarts and Diagon Alley, but it was too dangerous to risk being discovered quite yet. Unlike St. Mungo's, he knew that the school was full of people who would recognize him on sight. And there was no point taking the risk in Diagon Alley when he hadn't even prepared all of the materials he would need yet.

Finally, after exhausting all of the other appealing options, he found himself entering the little cottage where he kept his pet Mudblood. It had been a couple of weeks since he'd last visited her, and he hoped that she was feeling even more forgiving towards him now that she'd had that long to spend with her parents as they got used to the environment outside of the closet they'd been imprisoned in for months. If Tom could just get the stage set for Voldemort to make his entrance, then he knew he could easily hoodwink Potter's Mudblood into trusting him, or maybe even more.

When he entered the cottage, the Grangers were seated around the table enjoying a late lunch. The girl had stacked all of the books she wasn't working on in a corner of the small sitting area, and the one she was reviewing and her parchments had been carefully arranged at one end of the table so that the family could gather around the other end.

Mrs. Granger reared backwards in her seat when she saw him, but she threw one arm in front of her daughter as if that would do any good.

Tom supposed he would never understand any feeling as strong as the maternal instinct that made a mother throw herself in front of her child even when she knew it was hopeless. After all, his own mother hadn't even cared enough to keep herself alive to meet him, so how could he be expected to feel or understand any such bond?

Mr. Granger, who was facing away from the door, spun as he rose from his seat, his chair clattering on the tiled floor behind him. The man's eyes burned with unsuppressed fury, and his entire face was tense with the want to do something.

"Dad!" Hermione said sharply, before Tom had to decide whether it would seriously injure his plans if he were to react to the man's aggression. "Daddy, go into the other room."

Her parents clearly did not want to leave their daughter alone with Tom, although he couldn't imagine why not. She'd been meeting him alone for months now. He probably wasn't going to kill or anything today when he'd managed not to do it so far. With only a raised eyebrow to show his mingled confusion and amusement, he stood casually next to the door and watched as the Mudblood frantically but firmly herded her parents into the home's single bedroom. Finally, with one last reassurance that she would be safe, she pulled the bedroom door closed and let out a sigh as she leaned her back against it.

"I'm honored that you feel safe with me," he told her, his tone quite serious even if his eyes glinted with humor.

She squinted her eyes up at him from beneath her growing curls, weighing his mood. After a few moments, she seemed to judge how far she could push him today, and she said, "I feel secure in the knowledge that if you were going to kill me, you would have done it already." She straightened and glanced backwards at the bedroom door, where they both knew her parents were listening. "Could you...?"

Tom shrugged easily and lifted his hand to magically give them privacy. She really ought to have asked would he, but he was not of a mind to antagonize her today, so he refrained from saying as much.

"It would be more accurate to say that if I currently had a good reason to kill you, I would have already acted on it," he informed her. "For the moment, you are worth more alive."

At the beginning of her captivity, the Mudblood undoubtedly would have been terribly riled by that comment and it would have set Tom's plans back. Now she accepted it for the bald statement of fact it was and appeared unaffected as she crossed the narrow space and sunk down onto the loveseat in the sitting area. According to her thoughts, she actually appreciated his honesty! It really was amazing how the shift in her feelings from open hatred to disgruntled curiosity had affected the way she perceived the things he said and did. If he had still needed confirmation that he was handling the girl effectively, that would have been more than enough.

She nodded as if she had just confirmed something for herself that she'd suspected for a while. "You want me to join you so that you can use me against Harry."

Tom chose a chair on the other side of a small coffee table from Granger's loveseat, keeping his face impassive.

"I would prefer for you to join me rather than to see your mind wasted on the trite simplifications that others would use to limit you."

She pursed her lips, partly in disapproval of his characterization of her friends and the adults she respects and partly to try to mask how much it stroked her ego to have him praise her intelligence.

"You don't seriously think that I will become a Dark witch?" she asked finally in a shrill, incredulous voice. "I'm a Light witch!"

Tom allowed himself to let out a single sharp laugh. "A Light witch? Pray tell me, Granger, what exactly is a Light witch?"

"A witch who only practices Light magic, of course!"

He merely raised an eyebrow in response.

"And what is Light magic?" That seemed to startle her. She sat up straighter in her seat and opened her mouth several times as if to answer him, but clearly she could not think of exactly what to say. Tom gave her a wry smile. "Dark magic is defined based on the fact that the spells are normally used maliciously, but that is no real definition at all. It's about the intention of the caster, not the magic itself."

She blinked at him owlishly for several seconds before he could see her shrewd mind suddenly kick into a higher gear.

In a strong but not entirely confident voice, she said, "But there are some spells that can only be used to harm others no matter the intention of the caster, like the Unforgivables, so they would still be Dark magic even if you dislike the current definition. Since there are also spells that can only be used to help people, such as healing spells or--or the Patronus Charm, then it's only fair to have a corresponding label for Light magic."

"Ah, but whether a spell could be used to harm or to help is often a matter of creativity or subjective philosophical determinations, not objective fact," Tom replied easily.

He kept his tone even and engaging but was careful to strip away any inflections that might have seemed angry or argumentative, and she seemed to be paying proper attention.

"I could use the Killing Curse, for example, to give a person or an animal an easy death. We might disagree about whether death is morally correct in a given situation, but surely you can agree that here are at least some situations where a quick, painless death would be a mercy. And there are some situations where, although you might vehemently oppose the death, you could agree that if you can do nothing to prevent it then at least it would be better for it to be instantaneous and pain-free than the alternative. For example, if the law determines that an animal must be executed because it is a danger to humans, surely you can see how the Killing Curse might be preferable over the imprecise, sometimes ineffective blow of an axe."

She bit her lip in silent contemplation, and Tom could see that she was carefully considering everything he said. He allowed himself a mental pat on the back and continued.

"The Imperius Curse, of course, could be used to prevent someone from continuing some dangerous or harmful activity, perhaps even as an alternative to sentencing the worst sort of criminals or dangerous animals to death. It takes many witches or wizards working together to Stun a dragon, and using something like the Conjunctivitis Curse to blind it would hardly stop it from causing terrible damage until you could properly subdue it. A single skilled practitioner of the Imperius Curse could subdue the beast. The Cruciatus Curse is perhaps the one you will have the most trouble envisioning, because I imagine that you will have a difficult time agreeing that torture could ever be justified in any situation. However, if torture were used, the Cruciatus Curse, like the Killing Curse, would likely be the most humane method--it does not cause any actual harm to its victims, unless the caster allows the victim to flail into something or leaves the curse on for literally hours."

"But how could someone use healing spells or the Patronus Charm to hurt people?" she asked softly. "You can't hurt somebody by healing them or keeping Dementors away from them!"

Tom grinned at her, flashing his white teeth and allowing her to admire the effect on his handsome face. "You could answer your own question if you would only allow yourself, for a moment, to think like someone who might want to use those spells to hurt others. It is very important to be able to step into others' shoes."

Granger visibly swallowed, but she took the challenge for what it was. After several long moments, she released her worried lip from between her teeth and glanced up at him.

"I suppose that one could use healing spells to prolong torture."

There were several other more creative uses that Tom could think of just off the top of his head, such as purposefully healing an injury incorrectly and in a painful or disfiguring way, or placing some harmful object inside a person's body and then healing the incision so it stayed inside. He figured that pointing them out to the Mudblood would only make her focus on how evil he was and on whether he'd ever done anything like that, which would have gone completely against his current goals.

"Indeed, and if one wanted to use Dementors against others, the only way it would be possible would be to use a Patronus to protect oneself. That is what we currently do at Azkaban: the guards use Patronuses to protect themselves and also to keep the Dementors focused on the prisoners," he pointed out.

Of course, there was another way besides the Patronus to avoid the effects of Dementors. Tom had long hypothesized that he would not be affected by them, because his worst memories merely enraged him. They certainly didn't cause him any guilt or shame or emotional pain. But he supposed one had to be born with that particular ability.

"That's true," she answered, much more confident now that she felt like she was able to contribute to the discussion.

Tom decided to pull the rug out from under her feet again.

"Speaking of which, Granger"--he was sure to address her personally, as it was so rare for him to use her name--"I don't see any righteous indignation on the part of these so-called Light wizards regarding the humane treatment of the prisoners in Azkaban. Surely we can agree that whether a man has been sentenced to life for his crimes as a Death Eater or for a few months for stealing bread, he does not deserve to be starved and left to sit in his own filth, and to be literally driven insane by the Dementors."

Of course Tom could not possibly care any less about the treatment of Azkaban's inmates, but he could see that it made the Mudblood view him in a kinder light when she thought that he actually held some sort of morally upright opinion.

"You're right," she admitted. Her voice had taken on the kind of righteous indignation he'd mentioned before. "Well, if I ever have a chance, that is one of the things I will try to fix!"

Tom laughed as he rose from his rather uncomfortable chair. "If you ever get the chance, I'm sure that you will be a force to be reckoned with. Now, have you completed any assignments, or have you been spending all of your time with your parents?"

It would have been dangerous for her--or more likely her parents--had she not been able to give him anything, but she was not that irresponsible. Tom left the cottage with a stack of new parchments and a greater understanding of exactly how to manipulate Hermione Granger.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The trial lasted a full three days, and when it was over the Wizengamot awarded Draco five hundred Galleons for his medical expenses and pain and suffering, to be paid jointly by Dumbledore and Hagrid. The money was nothing to the Malfoys. Lucius had already had Draco pre-write a statement (with a certain amount of guidance, of course) and planned to inform the media the following morning that the family would be donating the money to Hogwarts, perhaps towards new facilities to house the animals used in Care of Magical Creatures.

"I hope that Headmaster Dumbledore and Professor Hagrid will both resign their positions," Lucius's own rehearsed statement said. "Anyone who could, through such negligence and even outright recklessness, allow harm to come to any of our children is clearly not qualified to protect them. Of course, if they do not do the right thing and instead leave it up to the Board of Governors to decide, then I will naturally recuse myself from the decision. However, I trust that both men are honorable enough to take responsibility for their mistakes."

Tom could admit, if only in the privacy of his own mind, that he deeply respected Malfoy's political savvy and the near effortless way he had backed Dumbledore into a corner with only a few words.

He would probably hold off killing the man, if only so that Draco could learn from his father.

The two of them were in Tom's study discussing the next step in their campaign (a full investigation into events at the school in the past several years, and hopefully eventual criminal charges against Dumbledore) when the door opened without anyone having knocked first. They both turned towards the intruder in surprise, and in Tom's case a Cruciatus Curse ready at the tip of his fingers, and immediately stopped short after they saw who it was.

Crabbe had returned. Only he looked more like somebody else wearing a Crabbe-shaped suit that was many sizes too small. His entire body was tense and his movements obviously strained and lacking a bit of fine motor control. It was somewhat amusing--if anything in such a situation could actually have been amusing--since Crabbe was at least twice Tom's size, but clearly it was the volume of the magical essence that mattered and not the physical mass.

"Leave us, Lucius," Tom ordered rather sharply, yet in a much more controlled tone than he could really have hoped for given the circumstances.

Lucius assessed the narrow space between Crabbe's body and the doorframe rather dubiously and turned to give Tom a panicked, pleading sort of look.

Tom had no patience for such things.

"Enough," he barked. "Go. He won't harm you."

There was a yet clearly implied at the end, but it remained unspoken. Tom couldn't guarantee it, of course, but he assumed that the other man--or spirit or whatever--was too interested in him to waste any time considering for the moment whether Malfoy deserved to be punished for his part in Tom's existence.

For his part, Lord Voldemort stepped further into the room with his eyes firmly boring into Tom's the entire way, letting Lucius squeeze by him and out the door unmolested. Tom was quite glad that it was impossible to miss seeing the gaudy Gaunt ring on his finger, and Slytherin's locket was visible between the undone top buttons of his shirt. It really let his other self know exactly where things stood.

It was probably very stupid on all different kinds of levels, but Tom really couldn't resist saying, "That looks incredibly uncomfortable."

Crabbe's body did not even blink; Tom personally would have felt a lot more comfortable if it had.

"Jokes!" hissed Voldemort in such mingled English and Parseltongue that it took even Tom a moment to decipher it. "You would joke?"

Tom thought that what he was feeling might be properly defined as apprehension. Not apprehension of Voldemort himself (he didn't even have a wand or his own body!), but rather apprehension about exactly how difficult it was to keep himself from crossing the room and flinging himself at the man. If he had thought that he'd gone a bit loony when he'd first been in the ring's presence, then it was only because he had not yet experienced being in the presence of the original soul. And if he had thought that the delicious licks of magic he'd experienced in the past had been addictive, then he would really have to watch himself around Voldemort.

He kept his expression and voice neutral when he replied, "You will have to forgive me. I am in a festive mood, as I just managed to effectively oust Dumbledore from Hogwarts."

Voldemort--Crabbe--tilted his head jerkily to one side and considered Tom silently for several long seconds.

Eventually, in that high, unnerving voice, he half-hissed, "We shall talk."