A Difficult Night

Chapter 4: "May Day"

The others bid them a terse good luck before Disapparating, leaving them with Antonin Dolohov to complete their team and a two-way mirror as a means of summoning assistance if necessary. Their first target was a small house, just on the outskirts of Hexham. The parents were pureblood, young; Evan knew them, slightly, from local balls, the occasional large family gathering. Unlikely that they would have dared to defy the Dark Lord once, let alone three times - but then, as soon as you began playing the game of believing in prophecies, you had to allow for the Sight's notorious ambiguity, agree to take what seemed most implausible into account. Despite the late hour, both were awake, and as the door flew open, they were caught for a instant in the attitudes of domestic calm: the woman standing before the stove with the child wrapped up in her arms; the vestiges of adoration fading from the man's face as he looked round sharply from her to them. He stood up, slowly, moved across the room to place himself in front of his wife and child.

"What is it? We've done nothing wrong..."

Dolohov laughed. "Do you presume to know better than the Dark Lord what you have or have not done?"

The names heading their portion of the list had seemed ominously familiar to Simon from the first, though he had known better than to ask for elucidation. Now, keeping back by the door of the warm, homely kitchen, not listening to Dolohov's routine gibes, he saw that he'd been right: he'd met these people several times, up here on visits to Evan. A hand crept to his face to check that his mask was in place, though he realised the pointlessness of the gesture. He remembered Terentia Brown's look of gratitude, at a ball not long after her marriage, as he partnered her shy, bookwormish sister Tullia for a couple of dances, some well-meant advice on possible careers from her husband Ambrose. On that occasion, Evan had made a point of talking the new bride herself out onto the floor. He saw again the flush of slightly guilty pleasure on Terentia's cheeks, Evan smiling at him in only half-ironic triumph over her head. Desire, determination, success. How long ago had that been? Four years, five? How young they had been, then.

"Enough of this." Evan took a step forward. "Out of the way."

The man was shaking so hard he could hardly stand, but he still managed to pull out his wand and begin to stammer out some sort of spell. Evan's cry of Expelliarmus, though, sent him flying across the room towards the others. The woman stood staring at him in shock, fixed to the spot like a rabbit before a stoat. She whispered something, it might have been his name; he hit her with a Body-Bind Curse and was about to follow it up when he was distracted by Dolohov.

"Rosier, do you know this one? It is your brother-in-law's." His wand executed a quick slashing motion, accompanied by a few muttered words. An oddly delicate sheet of purple flame flickered out and passed through the chest of the man at his feet; the results were startling. "The flame goes into the heart, then travels throughout the body, carried by the blood...you see? It causes much damage even without the incantation; the action is quicker then, too, though you may find there is not so good a spectacle."

Evan had left his willingness to be lectured to behind with school, and the fact that the test specimen here was a pureblood was hardly fitting. "Useful," he said, coolly. "But shouldn't we be moving on?"

"You cannot find the time to enjoy yourself, Rosier?" Dolohov's voice was laced with malice. "But, if you insist: how felicitous that there are three of us, and three of them. This one is mine, obviously. That leaves you with the child, Wilkes, yes?"

Though addressing Simon he did not look away from Evan, who cursed to himself, seeing the abrupt movement amidst the shadows by the door, counting the seconds it took for Simon to emerge: not quickly enough, not far enough, just up to the unsteady circle of light cast by the candles on the mantel. Had this not been dealt with earlier? Intimacy, again, proved nothing but mutual vulnerability. His wand was still trained on the prostrate woman and the child in her arms; he raised it a little, weighing up possibilities. He thought of Bella: her expression as she watched her cousin Regulus, unable to disguise his fear and nausea when they'd first been informed of this night's work; the meeting a few days later, interrupted by sudden screams from the next room. And still four more names to account for on their section of the list. He hit the woman with a quick burst of Cruciatus to loosen her grip on the child, bent to take it up, and had already half turned away from her when he dispatched her. They'd been told when they were learning the Unforgivables that they really needed to mean them. He didn't seem to find that, any more. How much easier it was when emotion could be dispensed with.

How exposed he felt. Evan was holding Terentia's baby with practised ease, unconsciously joggling it a little to stave off an incipient wail as he crossed the floor. For a moment, they could have been back in the Nott house for their first visit after Theodore's birth, Evan carrying his nephew over to his friend with an expression of mingled wonder and pride - but instead of Isabel watching them from her bed, weak but exultant, Dolohov's rapt stillness suggested that they were providing him with even more entertainment than the twisting, screaming man at his feet. Yet Isabel's absence was the only thing to be glad of in all of this: Evan had tried to act for the best there, at least. Now the baby was lying on the ground between them.

"Come on," Evan said. "Quickly."

He thought for a moment that Simon wasn't going to be able to produce the curse. But the will came from somewhere, and if he closed his eyes at the last moment, then who was to care? Dolohov could not see that, at any rate. Then they were standing together at the door, as their colleague stepped out into the open to send up the Dark Mark. The cool air was welcome and he breathed in deeply, aware for the first time of his racing pulse. "Ready to go?"

"Yes." Simon's voice was almost steady. "Where's next, again?"

"Lancashire, I think. Let's see if we can persuade him to fly some of the way - it's always a good ride over the Pennines."

.

Dolohov's cry rang out. "Morsmordre!" The second afterwards, four red jets of light flew out of the night and he keeled over. Stunning Spells. Aurors. In the green glow of the Mark, they could see them, closing in - one, two, three, four, five, six...

"How did they know we were here?"

Under the fear there was something else which Evan couldn't identify. A shiver of unease slid icily down his back. He put a hand to Simon's shoulder, gripped it hard.

"No bloody idea. Look, we can do this, all right? I'll distract them, you send the alarm to Severus."

He stepped forward, "How may we help you, gentlemen?"

"By coming quietly, filth."

The speaker was Scottish, and his lip curled in instinctive, ancestral hostility. Alastor Moody, was it? Something came whistling towards his head and he barely had time to put up a Shield Charm. Behind him, he could hear Simon calling Severus' name with increasing urgency. This was going to be difficult. The heroic last stand, was that the script they were meant to follow? He heard his own voice, earlier that evening: I think it could still be a useful story...Well, he did not feel ready for martyrdom. There were too many debts still to be called in.