Heroes Return

Under normal circumstances, Albus Dumbledore, headmaster of Hogwarts, Order of Merlin, First Class, and too many other titles for even him to remember, would not have received a Muggle in his well-appointed office, down a secret passage concealed behind a gargoyle decorating one of the many hallways in his school. Then again, the circumstances at the time could hardly be called normal, nor was his visitor exactly one of the more ordinary representatives of the non-magical folk.

"My dear Holmes," the great magician greeted the man standing across the desk from him. "What a pleasure to see you again--though it might seem that your visit, unfortunately, must be motivated by more than the simple desire to chat with an old friend."

The visitor raised a quizzical eyebrow as he shook the professor's outstretched hand. "Why, yes. May I assume from your deduction that you have been making a study of my methods?"

The headmaster's smile broadened. "Of course!" he replied. "Though, I must admit, having known you for as long as I have, I have had not inconsiderable practice in interpreting the various clues about your person. You came in here with a spring in your step and a twinkle in your eye--the same ones you get whenever, as you say, 'the game's afoot'. Therefore, old friend, you are at work again. The British government has need of it's most illustrious subject once more." He leaned back, smiling at his deduction.

The visitor cocked his head, regarding his host with a quizzical eye. Slowly, he began to nod. Then, Sherlock Holmes, the man who for one hundred and fifty years had been, and still was, the greatest detective on the face of the planet, laughed.

"Good old Dumbledore!" he cried. "Your talent for reading a man remains strong; I thought that, as I came in, I had the external manifestations of the excitement I felt at working with an old colleague again under control." He chuckled. "Only you, old friend, could have picked up on those subtle, non-verbal cues as well as I. I salute you!" He raised his pipe, matching action to words.

"Seriously," he continued, his face now sober, "I have been sent by her Majesty's government to help deal with your little conflict with the Dark Lord. There is reason to believe, old friend, that the conflict now brewing within the wizarding world is but a small strand in a monstrous web of evil that even now threatens to ensnare us all. The Dark Lord may have found allies in the most unlikely of places. Decades-long conspiracies are even now coming to fruition, and they all of them have need of resources that others possess. It is not inconceivable to think that two or more groups may ally each in the hope of exploiting the resources of the others in order to accomplish their aims. They are subtle, and sly, Dumbledore. Whatever links there may be between these secret agencies, you can be sure, old friend, they will be well hidden. The British government apparently believes that what small talent I possess would be best employed in tracking down such alliances, if indeed the Dark Lord has forged any. I intend to do my best."

Dumbledore smiled. "We wouldn't expect anything less from you," he complimented his friend. They had first met years before, a young Auror and a neophyte private detective still attempting to establish his reputation as a solver of cases, collaborating to bring to justice a mysterious killer who was then cutting a bloody swath through London high society, both wizard and muggle, first kidnapping his victims and then leaving their bodies, drained of blood after horrendous tortures, in prominent places. Working together, they had tracked the killer to his lair in an abandoned railway culvert. There, though they barely escaped with their lives, they had succeeded in preventing the notorious vampire William the Bloody from continuing his black-handed reign of terror over London town.

Over the years, they had worked together on several other cases, most of which, though being recorded by Holmes' friend and chronicler Doctor Watson, passed totally unnoticed by the public at large. It was a relationship that, for both men, had lasted far longer than initially anticipated. Holmes had, through intense experimentation, created an immortality elixir from the royal jelly of honeybees, and thus found himself, at the close of the twentieth century, standing beside his old comrade in arms, both having lived already twice the normal span of men, and neither having shown signs of slowing down.

The great wizard sighed. "To tell you the truth, old friend, of late the Dark Lord has been getting bolder in his attacks. The worst was last week. A squad of his Death Eaters apparated right into the middle of Diagon Alley. There...was bloodshed. They cast destructive and death spells into the crowd at random, not seeming to care what they shot at. Thirty people were killed. Many shops along the street were destroyed, including Ollivander's. By the time the Aurors got there, it was too late." He looked at the detective with tired eyes in a face that now seemed to show all of its one hundred and fifty years. "They left the Dark Mark behind them, floating above the rooftops. The wretched thing was visible from outside the alley."

"Which would mean that the population at large now knows that something happened," opined Holmes. "Though I would assume that, lacking further information, the nature of that occurrence would remain a mystery."

Dumbledore nodded. "Yes," he said, "but ambiguous or not, by this sign he has announced his presence to the world at large. I fear what this means. He has grown strong enough--or at least he believes that he has--to challenge the governments of the world, both magical and mundane, to battle." He sighed. "We were not expecting this. He has grown more powerful than we could have ever thought possible in such a short time. We cannot stand against him, Holmes. Not on our own. Tell that to the government. Tell them to mobilize what resources they can: their soldiers and ships and their airplanes and what super-people they can find. We are all in this now, for better or for worse." The old man rubbed his eyes once more, then took up his cup and drank some of his tea. He smiled, tiredly. "God knows, it will be a relief to end this mummer's farce. Despite what some people think, we are a part of humanity at large. We ought to walk openly among our fellow-men, not skulk in shadows like a thief with something to hide. Besides, if society can accept a woman made out of electricity, surely people who can do things just by waving wands will not be so strange, after all."

Holmes smiled. "Ah," he said, "the divine Ms. Sparks. The woman has an aura about her, that attracts those who in other circumstances would be afraid of her. She could rally the peoples of the earth to whatever cause she chose, should she wish to." He bowed his head, puffing on his pipe as he did so. "A pity she has withdrawn herself from the world. That disgraceful incident with the dead babies ought never to have happened at all. It broke her spirit, and the world has paid the price ever since. You know, Dumbledore, it was theorized by one Wells, a member of our little society, that she is in fact the incarnate form of the collective consciousness of all humankind, her abilities and personality being forming, and being formed by, the zeitgeist of the current age. 'The Spirit of the Twentieth Century,' he called her." He had a faraway look in his eyes. "Yet," he murmured, "if the spirit is broken, what hope is there for the Twentieth Century?" His fingers closed around the bowl of his pipe, squeezing it until the knuckles turned white with the effort.

Then, he looked up, took a deep breath, and stared his friend straight in the eye. "No," he said. "You and I, Dumbledore, Nemo and McLeod, Masaki and Cranston and all the rest; we will not give in. How long has it been, old friend? A hundred years? A hundred and twenty? We have spent too much time watching over humanity in the darkness to see it go spiraling down to the abyss." His voice sank to a whisper. "Come what may, old friend, we will find a way. This I swear."

The aged wizard regarded his long-time friend, and it seemed to him as if a flame had kindled anew in those piercing gray eyes. "Agreed," he said, hesitantly. This was not the Holmes he knew, cerebral, unemotional, yet utterly and unerringly focused upon his goals. This was a man who seemed as if he'd peered into a monstrous darkness--and had seen the darkness peer back. Something had frightened him--him who had faced down Moriarty and Fantomas and Doctor Nikola--faced these formidable men and triumphed. Dumbledore found himself beginning to worry. Whatever could frighten the great detective could, potentially, be truly monstrous indeed.

There was a long, awkward pause. Then, Holmes sat up, took a deep breath, and laughed--and the intensity of the moment before seemed to dissipate like the morning mist.

"My apologies, old friend," he said. "Do I seem strange to you today? Unusually grim? With reason, old friend, with reason. I have just received intelligence that the threat we face may be even greater than Her Majesty's government suspects. For all we know, they may have their fingers entwined even now in the workings of the governments of the world. They are terrible, Dumbledore, terrible and utterly evil."

"And who are they, Holmes?" asked Dumbledore

He paused to draw upon his pipe. "A group of--I cannot call them people, for no person would willingly commit such acts as I have seen of them. I learned of them when I recently received a visit from an old student of mine. Elijah Snow."

"The writer of the Planetary Guide?"

"The same. He came to me with a tale of four adventurers involved in a secret American space initiative during the Nineteen-Sixties. Apparently, these four were to be the secret crew of a moon rocket, to be launched in Nineteen Sixty-Three." He met the other man's gaze steadily. "I don't need to tell you that this was six years before Mr. Armstrong's own first steps upon the selenic plain were recorded for posterity." The Great Detective's piercing gray eyes flashed as he spoke. He took a deep breath. "The vessel never arrived at its destination. According to the mission records, halfway to their destination, the ship encountered an...anomaly, a region of space in which laws of nature distorted beyond all recognition.

"No one knows what happened thereafter, but when they returned to Earth, their craft having flung itself, out of control, around the moon, it was found that the Four were now no longer human."

Holmes looked somberly at the wizard. His thin hands clenched, even more tightly, around the pipe-bowl. It was clear to Dumbledore that the detective was in the grip of some strong emotion, and was even now struggling to master it. At length, the detective spoke.

"The record of their subsequent deeds is not a pleasant one, Dumbledore. Nor were their doings before that fateful spaceflight any less black. I was shown pictures by young Snow of a giant American science-city, deep in the Arizona desert. They performed experiments there--turning people, men and women both, into twisted, half-mad monstrosities, molding human flesh and blood as if it were clay." He shuddered. "I had only fragmentary evidence to go by, but from what I was shown...Dumbledore, even the worst excesses of the Nazis during the war seem mild compared to it."

"But surely there were those who opposed it," said Dumbledore. "Where did they come from, these unfortunate men and women whom these...people performed such things on?"

Holmes shrugged. "Here and there, taken off the streets of the cities of that great continental power. That was a dark time, Dumbledore. The fear of Communism lay heavy on the minds of many patriotic Americans. No one would miss a few suspected subversives. And America has ever been adept at concealing the less savory activities of its government from the populace at large."

The aged magician sighed. "And after the expedition? What then?"

"Then?" the detective asked. "Then they went mad with power. If their deeds prior to their ascension were horrendous indeed, their actions after the incident go far beyond the pale of anything remotely recognizable as humanity. The records brought to me by young snow told a tale of beings mad with power, of genocides and tortures conducted for the pettiest of reasons. Do you remember, old friend, the fate of the Vril-Ya race, back in 1974?"

Albus Dumbledore took a deep breath. "No," he whispered, incredulously. "Holmes, what are you saying? That this...Group of Four were the ones responsible for that? That they killed the Vril-Ya?"

The Great Detective nodded. "Yes."

The Vril-Ya had been a great subterranean race, occupying caverns below the great coal mines of Newcastle. They were tall and winged, with red skin and black eyes, capable of channeling a mysterious force called vril. They used this vril to heal, as well as, when necessary, to project bolts of incredible force to defend themselves. For a time after their discovery, over a hundred years before, tensions had run high between the humans and the underground-dwellers, culminating in the sealing-up of the entire civilization behind an immense cave-in. Slowly, relations between the two races had calmed, and just after the Second World War, the British government had begun establishing tentative contacts with their underground counterparts. Though members of each race had not yet been able to walk openly in the cities of the other, an entente of a sort had grown up, though it was felt that the human population was still too panicky, especially after a world war, for the existence of the Vril-Ya to be disclosed. Still, there were optimists on both sides who believed that this, too, would pass.

They never had a chance to be proven right. In 1974, all communication from the underground kingdom ceased, abruptly and utterly. After a few, panicked months, an expedition had been sent by the government to ascertain the fate of the subterranean race.

Dumbledore had not been a member of the party--but he had read the expedition's report. The explorers had discovered, to their horror, the entire race of the Vril-Ya, slaughtered within their caves. It had been obvious, from the way some of the bodies lay, that each and every one had died in great pain. Several had been dissected alive, their very organs removed as they lay struggling and pinioned. Some of the women had been violated, their very insides burst asunder by the force of the deed. The caverns bore signs of a mighty struggle; the walls were scarred by vril-blasts and scorched by an impossible heat. A great many buildings within the underground cities had been blown down by the force of the conflict, reduced to nothing more than lumps of gravel-sized rubble.

The expedition, which had comprised two members of MI5 renowned for their expertise in matters strange, as well as the mysterious adventurer known only as the Doctor and a respected aviator whose flying career and experience with paranormal activities dated back to well before the First World War, had reported that a great proportion of the carnage had seemed to have been committed purely for its own sake, like a child plays with a magnifying glass and a nest of ants under the sun.

The report had sent the wizarding world into a panic. The star of Voldemort was rising, it was feared by many that the destruction of the Vril-Ya was the signal for the commencement in earnest of the madman's twisted war on humanity. Yet nothing had come of it, and the Dark Lord had remained in hiding for several years more, building his forces for the coming conflict. It soon turned out that, powerful though Voldemort was, not even he, marshalling all of his forces, could have overcome the Vril-Ya. The initial panic soon died away, lost among other, more pressing concerns, and the massacre of the Vril-Ya simply became yet another of those mysteries of the Nether Depths, of which there were many others, though none so horrifying.

This news of Holmes, however, seemed to put a different light on the matter. The Vril-Ya had been a powerful race; had it come to a contest of might against might between the two worlds, Dumbledore was not sure that the surface dwellers could have stood against the underworld onslaught. Yet these powerful, beautiful beings had been slaughtered in their caverns, almost effortlessly, in almost the same way in which a man squashes a fly. The worst thing, Dumbledore thought, was that the Vril-Ya, despite their initial hostility, were not a violent race. For all their power, they were a peaceful folk; they would not have lifted a finger to destroy even the smallest of insects. Yet some one, some mysterious organization or alliance, had seen fit to invade their very homes, seemingly on a whim; to destroy the entire underground civilization, cast its many intellectual and aesthetic creations into a fire so as to be consumed, and plunder it of its technological wonders for the fulfillment of who new what dark purpose. The old man felt a thrill run through him as he considered his old friend's words. The Vril-Ya had been powerful, true, yet if his friend was right, they had been destroyed by just four people.

The aged magician shook his head, as if not wanting to believe that such beings could exist, that such power could be concentrated in four individuals. In the circles in which he moved, it was true, there were whispers of powerful beings who were said to indeed possess such power, though rarely was there solid evidence concerning their existence. To hear someone whose word he trusted swear that they were real--that there were indeed men and women with planet-destroying power walking about under the sun--it frightened him. Yet he knew it to be true. Holmes would never have come to him otherwise.

He stroked his beard, running his fingers through the luxuriant silver strands as he did so. After thinking a while, he finally said, "Then all is lost, I suppose. If they are truly as powerful as you say--"

"We will still try."

"I know. We will try our best to resist them." In the cage beside the headmaster's desk, Fawkes, Dumbledore's pet phoenix, awoke. The fiery bird hopped along its perch, perhaps sensing its master's disquiet. It stuck its head outside the bars and chirped at the aged wizard.

Dumbledore smiled. He stretched out his left hand and ran his index finger along the line of the bird's skull and neck. The phoenix closed its eyes and chirped happily at the headmaster's caress. "There, there," said Dumbledore. "We're not going to let Voldemort--or anybody else--harm a feather on you."

Holmes sat watching this. There was a small, sad smile upon his face. Abruptly, his expression tightened, as if an unhappy thought had wormed its way into his consciousness. He fidgeted in his chair.

The movement was not lost upon Dumbledore. He turned from lavishing affectionate attentions upon the phoenix to regard his friend with some concern.

"Holmes? Is anything wrong?"

The Great Detective seemed to drop out of his reverie. "No," he said. "Just remembering old friends." He leaned forward, planting his elbows on the table. "Tell me, Dumbledore, do you remember that black day, back in 1945, when you went to confront the sorcerer Grindelwald--there, in the ashes of Hitler's bunker in the ruins of Berlin? Who was with you then? Who was it?" The detective's voice had sank to a whisper. The fire in his eyes had reignited as he spoke. He leaned over the table, his head thrust forward and gray eyes boring like high-intensity lasers into those of the old wizard.

"Tell me, Dumbledore," he said, a harsh edge coming to his voice. "Tell me! You must remember!"

The headmaster's chair slid back. "Holmes? What is this? What's going on?"

"This is the last piece of intelligence Snow gave me, before he left. This is of vital importance, old friend. It is imperative that you recall who was present that fateful night. Please, old friend. The world itself may depend on your remembering."

The wizard's brows furrowed. "My allies?" he asked. "Why I--" He stopped short as the realization hit him. "I--can't remember! Holmes, the battle, it's--all a blur! I cannot remember a thing!" His face was grim as he reached down, opened a drawer within his massive desk, and withdrew his Pensieve, the magical device within which a large portion of his memories were stored.

"This is impossible, Holmes," he muttered. "The greatest battle of my life, the final destruction of a threat to the entire planet--yet I can not recall what happened." He looked up at the detective sitting across the desk from him. "This is far too important for me to have forgotten anything about it, far less everything. Old friend, is this strange loss of memory, too, the doing of those individuals you have spoken of?"

Holmes nodded. "Yes. But I suggest you endeavor to seek that missing memory out immediately. It will tell you better than I can how we came to this present predicament."

Dumbledore nodded. "Aye, I will." Then, he concentrated, drew his stray thoughts up around his mind like a cloak, and sent his consciousness diving, diving, deep down into the silvery depths of the mercury-like liquid that filled the Pensieve's bowl.

Visions of memories long past swirled around him as he floated, bodiless, in the strange, para-mental realm in which he found himself every time he used the device. He saw himself, on that dreadful day, waiting outside the house at Number 4, Privet Drive with a certain black cat, waiting for the groundskeeper Hagrid to arrive on Sirius Black's flying motorcycle with the infant Harry. He saw himself once more at the trial of Barty Crouch Jr., saw himself once more take part in the sentencing of that young man to a lifetime of imprisonment in the prison Azkaban, where soul-sucking Dementors stole every joy, every hope from every prisoner's mind as it arose.

He floated farther back, past his memories of that happy time, when Harry's parents, Lily and James, had been students of his, along with the rest of their little coterie. Sirius Black. Remus Lupin. And Peter Pettigrew. Had Albus Dumbledore, in that strange twilight zone that was where the Pensieve stored all his memories, had a body then, he would have frowned. The sundering of that merry group of friends was yet another crime among the many already heaped upon the Dark Lord's head.

He went even further, past the Swinging Sixties and the Booming Fifties, past the memory of his first encounter with the time-traveler who called himself the Doctor. Dumbledore would always have fond memories of the man; of the time they'd worked together to prevent the insidious robot race known as the Daleks from exploiting the abilities of certain rogue wizards in their planned campaign of global conquest.

As he traveled back in time, Dumbledore found more and more memories in which certain details of the scenes seemed blurred or out of place. He found this worrying. The Pensieve was ultra-secure, ringed about by numerous wards, the secret of whose disarming only Dumbledore knew in full. The mage did not exist, the headmaster was sure, whose power was sufficient to penetrate the wards and execute such drastic alterations upon any of the aged wizard's memories. So, how in the world had his memories, which had been thought safe, been tampered with? And why?

The answer eluded him, but Albus Dumbledore was sure that before the day was out, he'd find out. He swam even deeper, back into the '40s, and into the dark, desperate days of the Second World War.

He found the memory he wanted almost immediately. A thick mist hung over the entire scene, obscuring it in the same way a cataract impedes the vision of a blind man. All that could be made out were his own form, facing off against another, hazy in the distance, arms raised as if just about to cast a great and terrible spell. The aged wizard tried to enter the scene, to relive the memory of that day in his own body, to see once more with his own eyes the scattered rubble, the ruined temple to the old gods in whom Grindelwald had believed, and to whom he had been the chaplain of the Fuhrer himself, and the evil man himself, standing before the altar, arms raised, ready to cast that one last, desperate, defiant spell, held in readiness since the year before in the event of the defeat of the Third Reich--to cast that spell, and plunge the world entire into darkness, death and destruction, for if the Nazis could not hold that world within their grasp, they would very well make sure that no one else would.

He found himself blocked, as if a solid wall surrounded the vision, rendering it impassible to all who came. Stretching out his consciousness, he felt along the barrier, searching for some flaw, some weak point through which he could enter the forbidden zone.

There wasn't. Wherever he tried, the barrier seemed solid, flawless and diamond-hard. There was no way in--not, at least, unless he attempted to force his way in. The aged wizard drew back a little, the better to place himself such that the entire force of his attack was not wasted. He shuddered to think of the damage he could do, letting off any amount of mystical energy in this other-realm. Therefore, he aimed his attack carefully. If he did this right, even if his attack failed, there probably wouldn't be any averse side effects. If he failed...

Thus, Albus Dumbledore executed his attack with a finesse greater than was his usual practice. His mystical bolt splashed red against the misty barrier--and dissipated into thin air. The barrier shimmered, but held.

Again he struck, and again. Each time, the bolt evaporated, seemingly without effect, right off the barrier's surface. The barrier held.

Then, as Dumbledore prepared to strike a fourth time, the barrier began first to ripple, then to flicker, in and out of existence, at increasingly haphazard intervals. Then, in a flash of light that seemed to rival the sun itself, the wall disappeared.

And Dumbledore could now see the memory of long ago which only moments before he had forgotten.

He stood, arms raised, wand in hand, its tip towards the heart of the black wizard Grindelwald. Around him, Black Horrors danced, summoned by the Nazi to slay the mongrel Englishman challenging him, giving him the chance to conclude the ritual uninterrupted, to summon up the old gods, and thus use their power to avenge the Third Reich upon the bodies of the citizens of America and the United Kingdom. But Dumbledore stood, untouched, as the Horrors danced about him. They squealed, they cavorted--and they died.

For Albus Dumbledore had not come alone. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of a crimson and blue flash flitting about, cutting great bloody swathes out of the writhing masses of Black Horrors. Above him, emerald energy flared, as if drawn from the very heart of a star, and another dozen Horrors died. Beside him, a man in yellow and black crushed the skull of yet another Horror, fists striking with a force that could have, and had shattered tanks. A tiny hourglass dangled from his throat, and a great yellow cape billowed out behind the man's broad back.

All around the aged wizard, men and women in colorful costumes fought back the creatures of the night. They were a strange company: scientists, explorers, historians, even royalty. Some wielded mystic artifacts, channeling the very powers of the gods themselves. Others fought using marvelous devices of their own creation, and still more with the miraculous abilities that nature, fate or blind chance had bestowed them. The bravest of them fought against the creatures armed only with guns, makeshift melee weapons, or their own two fists.

Albus Dumbledore knew them well. They were heroes, all of them. The year was 1945, the place, Berlin. And those colorful heroes, those men and women who ran, fought, flew and wielded the powers of gods--they were the Justice Society.

And then, the hidden memories of nigh on a hundred years of secret history flooded in on him like a rushing tide.

There was a wrenching lurch--and Albus Dumbledore found himself back in his office, the Pensieve cradled between his hands, and his friend Holmes leaning across his desk, a concerned look upon his face. Fawkes, was chattering frantically, jumping up and down within his cage. Dumbledore shook his head, trying to clear it--the abrupt transition back into the real world had left him dizzy with its awesome speed.

"How long did I take?" he asked.

"You were in the trance for almost an hour. I was beginning to worry. How are you, old friend?"

Dumbledore waved his hand tiredly. "I'm all right, Holmes. Just give me a few minutes." He sat there, resting his forehead in his palm, till the pain had subsided a little--the dizziness had rapidly been superseded by a splitting headache. He glanced at Fawkes, who was once more sitting upon his perch, staring at him with wide and worried eyes.

"You miss your mistress, don't you?" he asked the bird. "The Great Bird of Flame, the mother of all your race. She calls to you, doesn't she, from wherever it is she's gone?"

"So you do remember?"

Dumbledore's face was grim. "Yes. I remember. Back in 1986, when the skies turned red as blood."

"And again in '97, when the Sentinels ran amuck."

"Yes..." Dumbledore nodded. "Onslaught and the Anti-Monitor. All those heroes, dying in the battles to stop them. And now we are weaker than ever before..." He sighed and bowed his head, stroking the head of the phoenix as he did so. "Tell me, Holmes, what is to be done now? We are overstretched already fighting Voldemort. What other resources can we bring to bear against this new threat?"

Holmes was silent for a few seconds. Then he spoke. "Snow has gone on to Japan to inform Masaki. Of us all, he possesses the greatest power. The Kherubim are unreliable; they are caught up with their own war against the Daemonites. The Men in Black are also distracted; according to our sources, they have received intelligence indicating that the Colonization is imminent. It is expected that they and the Syndicate will join battle any time now. Connor McLeod has sent the call out through the Watchers to such Immortals as will respond. The Count also has promised to pass the word on to the vampires; they too will stand by us. Other than that, we are gathering such heroes as remain." He smiled. "It is proposed that we form a league of extraordinary individuals to undertake our most hazardous missions."

Dumbledore chuckled. "Would that proposer happen to be the Countess?"

Holmes was grinning now, a feral, predatory expression. "She prefers, as always, to be referred to by her maiden name. Marriage has not altered her fiery nature one whit."

"I would hardly expect it to; after all, she hasn't changed in all the time I've known her!" The two men laughed.

"Seriously though," Holmes said after they had quieted, "The boy. His abilities are considerable. If our war against the Four is to be commenced any time soon, it will be necessary to eliminate their agents, both intentional or otherwise. Will you old friend, consent to a joining of strengths? In return for allowing us to recruit the Boy Who Lived?"

Dumbledore stroked his beard. "He might not wish to join you, old friend," he pointed out.

The corner of Holmes' mouth twisted up. "I know," he said. "All I ask is permission to approach him with our offer. Any decision to join us will be his, and his alone. Honestly, old friend," he chided the mage, "you ought to know me better than that!"

Dumbledore laughed. "Of course, of course! Forgive me my joke. Very well then, when do you plan to present young Harry with your proposal."

Holmes smiled. "I was hoping for tomorrow, as soon as he arrives. In fact, I was hoping to allow him a visit to the Diogenes Club, before presenting our case."

"That you have, old friend, that you have." Dumbledore chuckled. "You know, he thinks you're a character in a storybook."

Holmes grinned. "I wouldn't want it otherwise. I wouldn't be under cover if everyone knew I existed, would I?"

"No, of course not. Tomorrow then?" asked Dumbledore.

"Tomorrow."

And they shook on it.