Wizard's House

Wizard's House - 5

Click... click... click. The sound of his footsteps rang out in a steady cadence like the ponderous ticking of a clock. Leather soles against stone. Click... click... click. Snape paced slowly back and forth in the confines of his chambers, filled with a weary impatience and feeling unpleasantly at loose ends. He should have expected that. Strange to say, he missed his usual routine. He disliked teaching but it had given shape to his life. For many years now he had followed the school clock and calendar; patrolling the corridors for errant students, roaming the halls and grounds. When he wasn't on those endless patrols, he was in the classroom. When he wasn't teaching, he was brewing. This current inactivity gnawed at him; the more so because he was caged in the keep like a hound in a run, awaiting its Master's call.

He stopped his pacing with a flush of irritation and stared out of the tall narrow window with its arched top and intricately carved casing. He reached out and ran a finger over the stone images. When he was a child in these same chambers, the rosettes, acanthus leaves, and griffins had fascinated him. Now he saw them as some stone mason's frozen thoughts, doomed to an eternity of immobility and futility.

Beyond the glass the rain was still coming down. The sky was gray and beginning to darken as the unseen sun slowly settled toward the horizon on the other side of the sea.

The conversation with his cousin, Sabina, had unsettled him more than he cared to admit, even to himself. Jovian, he dismissed. Jovian was a fat fool who would cling to the coattails of anyone who might help him in his drive toward self-aggrandizement. Eventually the man's egoism would make him overreach himself and he would be killed by someone with less patience than Snape.

But Sabina... Sabina had intelligence and beauty. Who was it that said an intelligent Beauty was a Power? Snape resumed his pacing. Click... click... click. Sabina was doubtless overrating her brother's ability to do anything important, but she thought it worthwhile to offer a warning and he was inclined to take it seriously.

A light knocking at the door interrupted his musings. He slid his wand out of his sleeve and into his hand, and moved silently to open the door. Sabina was standing outside, wearing a translucent robe of pale orchid color that set off her pale beauty like a jewel.

"What do you want?" he asked.

"To talk you. May I come in?"

"I wasn't aware that there was anything else to say," he said. "You told me to be wary of your brother. Did I forget to thank you for your solicitude? I believe I did. In that case, thank you, and rest assured that I will keep your comments in mind."

"I want to talk about us, Severus."

He felt a rising sense of exasperation. Next, she would explain that she had always cared for him personally, that her adventures with other men were mere flings, that they had a glorious future ahead of them, and by the way, what about your position with the Dark Lord? Seduction would figure in it somewhere, but that was simple byplay.

He merely lifted an eyebrow, lowered the tip of his wand, and stepped aside to let her into the room. She glanced at the wand, but said nothing.

Sabina glided elegantly to one of the leather-covered armchairs in the study and settled down into it, artfully arranging the folds of the gossamer fabric, and lifted her face to him. The pupils of her eyes were too wide to be natural, giving them a dark and mysterious look. Snape wondered if she had put some kind of potion drops in them, like Muggle women once did with belladonna.

"Would you care for a drink?" he asked.

She nodded, and he called for a house elf.

After they were settled with their drinks -- a dry sherry for her, a double Ogden's on the rocks for him -- they sat in silence for a while. She finally broke it.

"Severus, truly, I meant what I said. I've missed seeing you."

"How am I supposed to respond to that?"

"A similar declaration would be nice." She smiled softly at him.

Snape took another sip of his firewhiskey. "You prefer lies to the truth, then. I told you that I have had other matters on my mind."

"Surely you could have spared a thought for me now and then," she said, in a voice that he could only describe as arch, and which irritated him. "Severus, it's true that I've been with other men, but they didn't mean anything to me, not really."

He chalked up a mark on his mental scoreboard.

"Did you expect me to be jealous?"

"Maybe I did," she said, looking at the floor, and twirling a lock of her pale hair around one forefinger. "You're not the jealous type though, are you?"

"I might be, given the right circumstances and the right woman."

"You mean that this isn't the right time, and I am not... "

He cut her off with a wave of his hand. "All of my attention and duty belongs to the Dark Lord now and for the foreseeable future." And let her pass that tidbit of information along to her repulsive brother.

"I like to think that there could be a future for us, together, after all this is over," she said in a low voice.

Despite a certain feeling of vindication and another mark on the scoreboard, that declaration wrenched his heart, reminding him too much of what Narcissa had said, before she left the house at Spinner's End.

Sabina set her sherry glass down carefully on a low table and rose from the chair, gathering the soft fabric of her robe around her. She glided forward to him, bent down, and fixed her lips on his. He returned her kiss, lifting his hands to caress her round, warm breasts. There was nothing new in this. He knew her body, had known her body, for several years now.

"Bed?" she whispered, parting her lips from his and drawing back slightly.

Apparently this was where seduction occurred in the scenario.

He nodded, rose, and followed her to the bedroom.

As he followed her, noting the practiced languor of her walk and the way that she held the skirts of her robe to model the curves of her hips, it occurred to him that there was something much too mechanical and practiced about this. He would enjoy her. Indeed, his body was already responding to the sight and scent of her, and to the expectation of pleasure, but at the same time he thought that simple, honest, passion would be much more exhilarating than this planned and mechanical encounter.

They undressed, folding their clothes neatly onto chairs on either side of the room. She laid down on the bed and held out her arms to him.

"Don't hurry too much," she whispered. "I want to enjoy you as long as I can."

He laid down next to her, fastening his mouth on hers in a fierce kiss, caressing and being caressed until finally he slid his member into her; pounding until she cried out. He took the final thrusts that brought him over the edge to his own release, and then rolled away to lie, sweating, next to her again.

It had been, Snape reflected, as pleasantly impersonal a lay as he might have gotten from any competent whore.

"You were wonderful," she whispered after a while, turning on her side and running a fingertip in figure eights through the black hair around his nipples. He fancied that there was a hard look to her face, but perhaps that was only a reflection of his own mistrust, grown strong over the years.

He captured her hand and lifted it to his lips to kiss her fingers.

She laughed softly. "Always the cavalier! Severus, we need to think about the future."

"Do we?" he said in a noncommittal tone, looking into her eyes.

"What if... what if the Dark Lord is vanquished in the end?"

"The Dark Lord is unconquerable," he replied flatly, sitting up and swinging his feet off of the bed.

"But... "

"To think of anything less is treason."

The color drained from Sabina's face. "I didn't mean that. Of course he will win, won't he! He'll win, and you will be his trusted lieutenant."

Snape picked his wand up from atop the pile of his clothes and cast a quick Scourgify over both of them and over the bed, then pulled a dark wool dressing gown out of the wardrobe.

"I will be whatever the Dark Lord requires of me," he said, putting on the rdressing gown and belting it around his waist.

"Yes, of course," she replied dully, getting up and reaching for her diaphanous lavender robe. She looked at him for a long moment and then wordlessly slipped back into her clothes.

"Some other time then, Severus."

She walked out of the bedroom, and a moment later he heard the outer door quietly open and then close.

He stood there in the bedroom for a few moments after she left him, thinking. He had won on points. Their interlude went exactly as he expected it to go. If he needed any other proof that Sabina was acting for her brother, he did not know what it would be--especially as he had used that brief moment of gazing into her eyes to seek and find exactly the thoughts he expected to see.

Snape felt a twinge of regret. She was a beautiful woman, and in another time and another place, she might have been much more than what she was; a lovely pawn and an informant for her brother. She would never be anything else. Still, she had warned him, and that had to count for something.

They were a strange family, the Carrows. That other brother and sister, Amycus and Alecto, came to mind and he dismissed them with distaste. Whatever information Jovian had gotten about the confrontation on the Astronomy Tower had undoubtedly come from one of them. They were a pair of burbling, sadistic, half-wits, and they would not survive for long. They did not have the intelligence to know when to speak up and when to keep their mouths shut.

Snape's fastidious nature recoiled at the thought that he was related to them, no matter how distant the connection. His Aunt Justina's husband -- now mercifully deceased -- had been a self-important fool like his son, and the man's half-brother was the father of Amycus and Alecto. That brother was also the grandson of some Prince great-aunt, which made Amycus and Alecto Snape's... what? Distant cousins?

Most of the old wizarding families were related but if there was any relationship between them at all, it was a tenuous one, for which he was grateful. The old man was currently locked up in a secure-ward at St. Mungo's, and family rumor said that the pair's mother had been a Knockturn Alley whore.

Reflection on the unsavory Carrows led his thoughts back to the night of Dumbledore's death. He had managed to shove that memory off into a back compartment of his mind, where he could view it almost dispassionately. Apparently none of the Death Eaters who had been there that night noticed, as he had, that there were two broomsticks on the Astronomy Tower. It was possible, of course, that whoever came to the tower with Dumbledore had already fled down the stairs to bring help for the old wizard and was long gone by the time that the Death Eaters arrived.

Possible, yes. But one of the Death Eaters -- a brutal-faced man in the lower echelons, whose name he had never bothered to learn--did not come back down the stairs and join the rush out of the castle and out of the grounds. The only reason would be if he was stunned or killed after Snape led the others away. Whoever stopped him must have been on the Tower.

The events of that night were well-known and well-publicized-- especially his own part in them. There had obviously been an eye-witness, and if Snape had to guess at the identify of that mystery figure, he would put his money on Harry Potter, hidden by some spell of Dumbledore's or cowering behind an invisibility cloak.

No, not cowering. The boy was rash, reckless, and hot tempered, but he was no coward. The way that he flung himself into a duel with Snape which he could not possibly win proved that.

Snape rubbed his temples, where tension promised to grow into one of his all too frequent headaches. After he and Draco Apparated to the Dark Lord's manor house--and before the terrified boy learned the penalty for failing in his assignment--he had managed to elicit an account of just what was said between Draco and his Headmaster. The boy grudgingly admitted that he could not bring himself to utter the killing curse. If the other Death Eaters and Grayback had not gone to the Tower, it was possible that both Draco and Dumbledore might have emerged unscathed.

Relatively unscathed. No power on Earth, no combination of potions, could have cured Dumbledore and brought health back to his withered hand. The Headmaster never admitted to Snape how he came by the injury. He brushed aside questions. That in itself was intriguing. There was something which he had not wanted his spy to know. He was on the track of something important and therefore...

Snape wrenched his mind away from that train of thought. If Dumbledore had set something in motion though his frequent absences from Hogwarts, it was better not to dwell on the possibilities. Knowing, or guessing, would only mean one more thing to hide from the probing mind of the Dark Lord.

At the moment, only one thing was certain: The only wizard whom the Dark Lord ever feared was dead and gone. There was no one in the wizarding world who could come even close to replacing him. The organization he had built up--Dumbledore's vaunted side of Light--could not win by strength. Their only hope lay in subterfuge, and Snape wondered wearily if any of them had even that much ability.

He could not foresee the ending of it at all, and his lips twisted wryly as he thought of going back to his mother for another of her card readings.

Everyone seemed certain that some momentous confrontation was in the offing, that the final battle was near and that one side would emerge victorious. What no-one seemed to consider was that battles can leave events undecided. It was entirely possible that a great many people would die and that the issues would still be unresolved. In fact, he thought, watching the soft rays of moonlight filter through the small panes of the arched bedroom window, it was the most likely outcome. He was not a man given to despair; he had fought too many battles, both personal and public for that, but the future was flying fast on ebon wings, and it seemed as though only darkness lay ahead.

At least, for the moment, the rain had stopped.

Irena Candy Wizard's House 5 7