Summon the Lambs to Slaughter

Chapter Forty

Rebecca had intended to take her new owl to the owlery and have a much-needed soak before going to pick and brood over her untouched food in the Great Hall, but when she arrived in the Entrance Hall, Headmaster Dumbledore was waiting sedately beside a clanking, humming set of armor.

"Ah, Miss Stanhope, might I have a word?" he asked quietly, and though he was smiling, his eyes were piercing and grave.

Her stomach, sloshing with the three bowls of savory stew she had eaten at the Three Broomsticks, cramped and dropped into her knees with a painful lurch. No doubt word of what had happened between her and the inimitable Mr. Malfoy had reached his ears, either from McGonagall, who would have trumpeted her probable maiming to anyone within shouting distance, or from Malfoy. She tightened her grip around the covered iron cage on her lap and rolled forward.

"Yes, sir," she said.

Neville, who had returned with her, hesitated beside her, his eyes surveying the Headmaster in cautious, curious inquiry. He shifted from one foot to the other, his mittened hands stuffed into the pocket of his robes. "Should I come, too, Headmaster?" he asked in weary resignation. "I saw the whole thing, and so did Seamus."

The Headmaster's thick, white eyebrows furrowed, an expression of polite confusion on his face. "Saw what, Mr. Longbottom?" His hand came up to tug on his long, tapered beard in thoughtful, drifting strokes.

Neville blanched, a mortified flush suffusing his round cheeks, a scolded cherub, and he dropped his bug-eyed gaze to the safer, less intimidating vista of the stone floor beneath his feet. "'Bout the skirmish with that prat, Malfoy," he muttered unintelligibly at the toes of his shoes.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Longbottom, I'm afraid I didn't hear you," the Headmaster replied, and stepped closer to the highly discomfited Neville.

Poor Neville, keenly aware of the milling students who were watching the exchange with greedy interest, quailed and tucked his neck into his shoulders, a hapless turtle trying desperately to retreat from the snapping, slavering jaws of a wolf. He shot her a petrified, sidelong glance as he continued to stare at the floor with feverish concentration.

"-confrontation with Malfoy," he muttered, as indecipherably as ever.

The Headmaster straightened, and the twinkle in his eye, absent when she had first arrived, blazed with renewed vigor. "Confrontation with young Mr. Malfoy, did you say?" he said, amused. Then, more to himself than to her or Neville, who was gazing at him in nearly pathetic gratitude at not having been reprimanded, "That certainly explains quite a bit." After a moment, his gaze sharpened and returned to Neville. "No, that won't be necessary. I believe Professor McGonagall has already sorted out that regrettable situation, much to Mr. Malfoy's chagrin. Off you go. Miss Stanhope might be a while."

"Yes, sir." Neville turned to her and smiled. "I'll see you, then."

She waved. "All right. If I get back soon, would you like to play some Exploding Snap?"

Neville brightened. "All right."

With that, he turned and melded into the steady stream of pupils drifting toward the Great Hall. She wished for a moment that she was with him, jostled by knees and shoulders and wrapped in the warm simmer of body heat, but there was no shirking the Headmaster. She turned her longing gaze from the place where he had been and fixed them on the Headmaster's face.

He knows what I'm thinking, she thought with no surprise whatsoever, and mustered a wan smile.

The suit of armor behind the Headmaster hummed more loudly, and she eyed it with wary curiosity. The visor flopped closed with a shrill creak, and the metal hand holding the tarnished halberd tightened around the shaft.

The Headmaster followed her gaze, and his smile broadened into a grin. "Isn't that most remarkable?" he said. "It's been doing that since breakfast. I expect one of the younger Aurors tried to Charm it into some sort eavesdropping device," he said drily.

She snorted. "Have they always been so incompetent?" Then, as she realized that might not be the most politic of things to say, she added, "Sir?"

The Headmaster, however, seemed unruffled by her unsolicited political commentary. Indeed, he chuckled and rested a warm hand between her scrawny shoulder blades to steer her in the direction of the gargoyle that led to his office. "Not always, Miss Stanhope. Professor Moody was once an Auror, if you recall, and Kingsley Shacklebolt has always done his job most admirably. Sherbet lemon?" One of the wrapped candies materialized beneath her nose.

"Thank you, sir," she said, and stopped in order to take the proffered sweet from him. When it was nestled safely in the folds of robe that sagged between her knees, she resumed her dogged roll forward.

"Bertie Bott!" the Headmaster said when they reached the squat, stone-fanged gargoyle that for a millennium had guarded the office of the Headmaster of Hogwarts. It leered suspiciously at Rebecca for a moment, and then, with a grating shift of haunches, it swung outward to reveal the spiraling staircase that wended its way into ichorous, inky darkness. He stepped inside and beckoned her to follow.

She did as she was told, and when her back wheels had cleared the threshold, the gargoyle snapped shut again with an ominous, reverberating crash. She swallowed a knot of inexplicable apprehension that welled in her throat as she locked her brakes, and her hands, though still frozen and blue from the mid-November chill of Scottish winter, prickled with a fine sheen of greasy sweat. Her nape was taut with hard ridges of gooseflesh, and the stew, which had tasted like ambrosia to her shriveled stomach while she ate it, curdled, and she burped soundlessly in the darkness. She wrinkled her nose at the acidic aftertaste.

What the hell is wrong with me? she thought, dimly aware that her sweaty fingers were clamped around the bars of her owl's cage in a tremulous, white-knuckled grip. I've been on these stairs before. There is no danger of falling, and I'm here with the Headmaster, serenity incarnate. So why can't I relax?

From its cage, the owl gave an indignant hoot and sidled from one side of its perch to the other, as though it sensed her unease and was trying to flee. She willed her fingers to slacken their iron grip, but they remained rigid and unyielding as the fingers of a corpse, and she fought an ill-advised titter as the stairs beneath her wound gracefully upward, a gray serpent burrowing blindly beneath the earth.

Good Christ, I'm having a panic attack on the stairs, right behind the Headmaster. How fortuitous.

He isn't here, that's what is wrong with you, said a rational, cruelly sane voice inside her head. All other times save one, you've been sandwiched between black wool and tartan and smothered in the earthy, ancient, comforting smell of allspice and parchment dust. That's what is wrong, what is missing.

The voice was right, of course. Strange as it was, she had come to associate Professor Snape and the inexorably spiraling stairs in her mind, an incongruous tandem that her mind understood nevertheless. She had come to expect that, when she climbed these steps to Headmaster Dumbledore's secluded ivory tower, he would be there, a daunting, scowling pillar of bedrock normality, a pale, bright compass in the pinwheeling darkness. But he was not here now, and his simple absence had transformed the stone risers and encroaching walls that she sensed rather than saw into an alien and dangerous landscape.

She peered into the impenetrable shadows, strained her burning, bulging eyes for a glimpse of phoenix red or the luminescent silver-white of beard, and for a tantalizing instant, a swatch of color rose from the murk, but just as quickly as it had come, it disappeared, swallowed by the gloom. The cage rattled in her grip, and the cold of the bars bit her fingers through the thin linen covering.

Her eyes abandoned their search for the Headmaster, or anything else, for that matter, but her nose was not so easily daunted. The red, wind-chapped nostrils flared, the tiny hairs within each gathering to them motes of dust, unseen messengers of things and people that had passed this way before her, pieces of history the eyes could not see. She knew what they were looking for, just as she knew that they would not find it. It had been too long since he had graced these steps, and those who had come after him had washed any vestiges of him away, replaced them with traces of their own. She inhaled more deeply anyway, hoping against hope, but all that she found was the lemongrass and warmed earth scent of the Headmaster, and beneath that, the far less pleasant odors of cold, wet stone and mildewed age.

The stairs glided to a stop, and the Headmaster stepped forward and opened the door to his office, his steps light and spry despite the chill. He strode to his desk without checking to see that she was behind him and seated himself behind his desk. His hand reached automatically for the bowl of candies afforded a place of honor on his desk, and as she entered and closed the heavy door behind her, he slipped one of the obnoxiously yellow candies into his mouth.

She had expected him to gesture her to the space before his desk, but he did not. He merely sat in his chair and looked at her over the polished golden rims of his half-moon spectacles. He was not smiling at her, but neither did he appear angry. His face was a carefully sculpted blank, and she was somehow sure that he was looking for something only he could see, an esoteric sign from her stiff and bewildered body that it was ready for what he was about to tell her. She shifted in her chair, her eyes fixed on the long, narrow bridge of his nose and the muted golden gleam from the rims of his spectacles as they caught and reflected the wan firelight from the blaze in the hearth. The heat had not yet reached her, and her exhaled breath emerged in a gossamer plume. On his perch beside the door, Fawkes preened and trilled, a single note that hung in the air long after he had closed his beak, and her owl let out an intrigued hoot.

The Headmaster steepled his fingers over his abdomen and said, "Are you all right, Miss Stanhope? You look a bit peaked."

She nodded, though in reality, she was not certain how she was. "I'm fine, sir. I was just-," She stopped abruptly. She had been about to say, I was just used to being sandwiched between Professors Snape and McGonagall, but then the juvenile part of her brain, the peculiar ability of every teenager to find the perverse in the innocuous, had realized how that would sound, and she chomped viciously on the inside of her cheek to suppress a bray of horrified laughter. "I was just very cold. Being from Florida, I'm more accustomed to perpetual warmth," she amended hastily, and forced herself to sit up straight.

"Indeed," was his only response, and she knew at once that he had seen through her flimsy lie. Then, "Would you like some hot tea? Cocoa, if it's more to your liking?"

"Yes, sir, I would like that very much," she said, grateful that he had not pressed her for the truth. Despite the persistent, encompassing warmth that had at last permeated the expansive room, her bones were brittle icicles beneath her skin, and the tortured joints of her hips were filled with bits of ground glass.

"Dipply," he called, and clapped his hands twice.

Almost immediately, there was an echoing crack, and the stooped, wizened little elf appeared, one leathery hand fisted in the small of her back, as though she were trying to massage away a cramp. She bowed, her drooping ears scraping the floor, and peered inquisitively at the Headmaster with bulbous, goggling eyes.

"Is Headmaster Dumbledore calling Dipply?" she asked, her squeaky voice loud in the otherwise quiet room.

The Headmaster smiled, and with it, some of his more customary vivacity suffused his face. "Yes, Dipply, I did. Would you please bring Miss Stanhope and me some tea and hot cocoa?"

"Is you wanting scones and cakes, Headmaster Dumbledore, sir?"

The Headmaster lifted his beneficent gaze from the elf and raised an eyebrow in mute query. When she shook her head, he looked down at the waiting Dipply again. "No, the tea and cocoa will be sufficient."

"Yes, Headmaster Dumbledore, sir." Dipply lifted the ragged hem of her tea towel and dropped into a curtsy. "Right away, Headmaster Dumbledore, sir." She disappeared with another miniature thunderclap.

"I see you've bought an owl," he said in the ensuing silence, and inclined his head in the direction of the cage in her lap.

"Yes, sir." She shifted the weight of the cage from her quadriceps with a wince. "I thought it might prove useful."

"Oh?"

She smiled. Funny how he can infuse so much into that single, breathy syllable. "Yes, sir. It has occurred to me that I'll need a bit of outside help with the endeavor upon which we have agreed. Help from across the Atlantic."

"A trans-Atlantic owl, then?" There had been no need to elaborate on the "endeavor" to which she had so euphemistically referred, apparently.

"Yes, sir."

A smile skirled on the corners of his mouth. "I should warn you that the post is being watched most vigorously, Miss Stanhope. All incoming and outgoing post is read and approved by Ministry officials."

"I expected so, sir, but I can't see why the Ministry would be interested in a fantasy story that's been passed among the broken and bored from time immemorial." She smiled and shifted the owl's cage again.

She thought he would surely pursue this enigmatic line of discourse, but he only rubbed his hands together and said, "No, I should think not, though the more ambitious are apt to think that it is an allegory for governmental subversion."

She laughed. "I don't see how, but I'll bear that in mind, sir."

"It has been my experience, Miss Stanhope, that a skillful government can uncover a conspiracy in a simple request for a bottle of ink." He smiled, and some of the tension left his face. He looked more like himself now. "Now," he said briskly, leaning forward in his chair, "about this confrontation with Mr. Malfoy."

Her hands tightened their grip on the cage, and her eyes itched with the need to roll toward the heavens in pained exasperation, but she knew better than to show such disrespect to the Headmaster, and she dutifully kept her eyes fixed on his face. "Yes, sir?"

"Was it serious?"

She shrugged. "I didn't think so, sir. He took offense to the fact that I put my hand on his shoulder, and we had a skirmish."

"I see," said the Headmaster, seemingly unsurprised by this information. "Do you consider the matter closed?"

She gave a dismissive nod. "Yes, sir." But you can bet your boots McGonagall doesn't, oh, no.

"How did you find Hogsmeade?" he asked, and popped another sweet into his mouth.

Tired as she was, she did not miss the question couched within the idle query. Did you learn anything of interest? Have you made any progress? She reached behind her neck with one splay-fingered hand and kneaded the stony muscles there, wincing as stiff fingers prodded the knots of tension.

"I had a chat with Colin Creevey," she said as she jabbed the point of her finger into the center of a particularly stubborn mass of unyielding sinew. It released with a gelid pop, and her left arm warmed with improved circulation.

Before he could respond, Dipply the house elf reappeared with a loud pop, a tray held above her head. On it, a silver tea set was bookended by a pair of steaming teacups, and a bowl containing sugar cubes teetered precariously on the furthest edge.

"Here you is, Headmaster Dumbledore, sir," she announced reverently, and slid the tray onto his desk, careful not to dislodge any of his inkpots or piles of untidy parchment from their places.

"Thank you, Dipply. Magnificent, as ever!" He beamed at her through the clouds of steam rising from the cups in front of him.

Dipply dropped her gaze and giggled, tugging furiously on the hem of her tea towel. "You is too nice to Dipply, Headmaster Dumbledore, sir," she squeaked happily. She looked up at him again, her eyes wide. "Is Headmaster Dumbledore needing anything else?"

The Headmaster shook his head. "No, Dipply, that will be all."

Dipply dropped into a low curtsy, and her aged knees gave a muffled creak of protest. "Good evening, Headmaster Dumbledore, sir," she said gravely, and disappeared again with the sharp crack of displaced air.

The Headmaster picked up his teacup, took an experimental sip, and put it down again. "A bit of sugar, I think," he murmured, and reached for the tongs; he dropped in three cubes. He picked up his spoon and stirred the hot liquid with languid grace. "You were saying?" he prompted her.

"Oh, erm, yes, sir," she stammered, startled. She had been watching him stir his tea with envious fascination. He was so casual, so graceful in his movement, much like Professor Snape. Wherever he was. She ignored the wrenching pang the thought of her absent Potions Master produced and scrubbed her cheeks with her palms. "I was just saying, sir, that I chatted with Colin Creevey in Hogsmeade."

"Yes, go on."

She opened her mouth to oblige him, but then hesitated. Her eyes darted to the corners of his office in search of cleverly concealed Listening Charms. The probability of the Ministry surveillance machine having enough brass to bug the Headmaster's office without his knowledge or consent was infinitesimal, but after seeing Fudge prance into Professor Snape's classroom and attempt to arrest him in full view of onlooking, gape-mouthed students, she was convinced that his avaricious malice knew no bounds.

She scanned the room, lingering over the corners and the dusty crevices of the bookshelf. The Sorting Hat glowered morosely down at her from its perch atop one of the highest shelves, and she wondered idly if it was disappointed that it had never been given the opportunity to peruse her thoughts and ransack her mind in the name of proper placement. She couldn't see why, and she supposed it was conceited of her to think that after being granted access to hundreds of thousands of worthier and greater minds than her own, it would care that it had not pillaged hers, but all the same, as her gaze drifted over the tatty rend that was its improbable mouth, she could not shake the suspicion that it resented her for being granted admission to these hallowed halls without its tacit mark of categorization. A place for everything, and every thing in its place.

The hat seemed to scowl at her, and she sneered in unconscious defiance. Her thin lip was still curled as she shifted her roving eyes to the scores of portraits hung on the walls, all of whom returned her scrutiny with varying degrees of interest. Several of them smiled indulgently at her, while still others eyed her with laconic amusement. A dour, pointy-chinned man in Slytherin green frowned impressively at her from his frame beside the door, and the sneer on her face relaxed into a smirk. An expression of furious, stewing displeasure was a Slytherin trait, then. She had been wondering about that.

"Phineas Nigellus has been on the wall for a very long time, and I must say that I have never seen anyone look at him quite that way before," the Headmaster observed drily.

She snapped her head in the direction of his voice, jolted from her fierce inspection. "Sorry, sir. I was just thinking about-never mind; it isn't important."

Oh, but it was important, important and exquisitely painful. The man in the picture reminded her of Professor Snape, from the haughty ghost of a smirk upon his lips to the flawless, regal posture to the billowing, elegant robes. The similarities were so marked that part of her wondered if they were not somehow related in the distant past. She closed her eyes and beat back a sudden wish to see Professor Snape come striding into the room, eyes alight with contempt and his voice a satin whip against her aching ears.

Wish I may, wish I might have this wish I wish tonight.

"You were asking about Hogsmeade and Creevey." She settled her gaze on the untouched cup of hot cocoa on the tray in front of her and willed the tantalizing thought away. "I was just wondering about uninvited guests, sir," she muttered abruptly, and leaned forward to pick up the cup of cocoa. It was tepid, and a thin, mottled scrim of milk floated at the top of the cup.

"Ah." Dumbledore sipped his tea. "I can assure you that you may speak freely here." He offered her an encouraging smile.

Try as she might, she could not find it within herself to return it. She took a dispirited sip of cocoa and studied the floor. "Well, he was there the morning Potter collapsed. He was bringing Professor Snape a message and knocked the phial of Harry's potion off the corner of the desk." She shook her head. "Damndest catch I ever saw. That phial was upside down, and Colin never spilled a drop." She fell silent and took another unenthusiastic sip. "Don't blame him, though; Professor Snape would have had his head."

Oh, Jesus, I'm talking about him like he's dead and gone, she thought with sinking horror. Reminiscing for the dead.

He may very well be, and you have to face that.

I don't want to, she thought fiercely, and the gritty aftertaste of cocoa was bitter in her mouth.

"Anyway," she continued roughly, "I thought that since Colin had touched the phial right before it was given to S-Harry, he might have noticed if something were amiss." She stifled a humorless smirk; she had nearly blurted out "St. Potter".

"And did he?" The Headmaster asked, his serene gaze suddenly sharp as he leaned forward in his chair.

She, in turn, slumped wearily in hers. "No, sir; absolutely nothing out of place according to him, but he also concedes that he wasn't looking for trouble, either." She clutched her cup and stared at her feet.

"No one was. We were complacent," he murmured to no one in particular.

She looked up, taken aback at such a frank admission, and was dismayed to see that he suddenly looked very old and very frail, the skin of his face creased and thin as papier mache, his eyes as bleak as her own, dark hollows inside his face. She cursed herself for not being able bring him a glimmer of hope, and wished that there was something she could say or do to make it all right again. If only she were stronger or faster or smarter. If only she were normal.

Fat lot of good that will do you. This is a mind game, not a wrestling match. A pair of spry legs is about as useful as a rocket launcher.

Maybe so, but if I didn't have this hunk of metal strapped to my ass, I could hide and sneak, crouch in the shadows and eavesdrop.

As if the perpetrator is going to chat about poisoning the savior of the wizarding world over his morning tea, her grandfather grumbled, and on the vivid canvas of her imagination, she saw him as he would have been in life, bent beneath the weight of years and clutching his hand-carved walking stick, his squat, blunted fingers fisted around a knobbled protrusion his penknife had missed. Cloudy blue eyes stared disapprovingly at her from behind thick square spectacles, and his craggy, age-spotted jaw was set in a hard line of reproof. Wisps of red hair streaked with white fluttered in an imagined breeze, the ancient, fragile plumes of an old and dying phoenix.

No, I suppose not.

So get off the agony wagon and concentrate on what you can do, the figure inside her head commanded. You're a bloody witch, after all. Make yourself invisible. There's bound to be a spell for that.

Flitwick would know, and if he doesn't, or can't say, there is always the library.

She made a mental note to visit the library in the morning. She was sure she would have time to visit before the first lesson of the day. She never slept long anymore, woken well before dawn by nightmares she could not remember, but which left her drained and covered in a sticky sheen of sweat that not even the bath could cleanse. She would simply forego the bath and head straight for the library. Somewhere within the well-organized pantheon of shelves and musty, teetering stacks, she would find a spell to hide her from prying eyes.

How ironic it was that after fifteen years of struggling to be seen, she now needed the anonymity she had come to loathe. All the eyes that had learned to see her, reluctantly or otherwise, must be blinded again, indifferent to her presence. She needed to turn them away, make them think she was as inconsequential as a tree stump or a stick of old furniture. It would have been funny had it not been so terrible. She laughed, a choked, humorless chuff that caught in her throat.

"I have to go backward to go forward. Whee," she muttered into her cup.

"A most distressing phenomenon, is it not?" Dumbledore said quietly, and gave her a wan smile.

She stared at him, her cup raised halfway to her lips. "Has it ever happened to you, sir?" She felt stupid even asking him such an invasive question, but the words escaped her lips before prudence could call them back. She flushed. "Sorry, sir. I shouldn't have asked." She took an enormous gulp of now-cold cocoa and grimaced as the slimy liquid washed over her tongue.

To her surprise, he only smiled and removed his spectacles, polishing them on the sleeve of his robes. "Indeed, it has, Miss Stanhope. More often than I wish to consider, quite frankly, but I'm afraid it's unavoidable." He replaced his spectacles and pushed them onto the bridge of his nose.

She felt a surge of delicious relief at those words. "I just feel like a lousy detective. I don't even know where to start or what questions to ask or how to ask them. I'm just afraid I'm going to mess things up with all these Aurors lurking around. Especially that Umbridge cow. I don't like her at all." She set her teacup on the desk with a vehement clatter.

"Surely you didn't expect to unravel the mystery in a single day?" the Headmaster asked gently, pushing his own empty teacup and saucer away.

"No," she answered, much more sharply than she had intended, and she stopped and took a steadying, calming breath. "No, sir," she continued when she had regained her composure. "I didn't. I knew it would be hard, the hardest thing I would ever do, but I didn't think it would be so hard to get started." She sighed and harrowed her fingers through her hair.

"I see. Well, you must have questions."

She snorted. "Oh, yes, sir. What questions don't I have?"

"Some are more pressing than others, are they not?" he said, his eyes shrewd and wise behind his spectacles.

"Of course. What poisoned Harry? Where did it come from? Who put it there? How? Why? When? Because I know that Professor Snape didn't do it. Speaking of Professor Snape, is he even still alive, or am I fighting for a ghost?" She stopped, her chest heaving. She realized that she was panting, and she was not at all surprised to find that she was perilously close to tears.

Brilliant. Portrait of mental stability, you are. She swiped fiercely at her aching eyes and stared at Dumbledore in mute, miserable defiance, daring him to mock her outburst.

He was silent for a very long time, and with each second that passed, she grew surer that when he did speak, it would be to tell her that he had misjudged her, that she was not up to the task at hand, and though she knew her stomach would churn in outrage at the pronouncement, a small, childish part longed for it, craved the cocooning refuge of McGonagall's coddling skirts. She blinked at him and waited.

Finally, he folded his hands atop the desk and fixed her with a somnolent gaze. "I believe I can answer two of your questions, Miss Stanhope, but before I do, I must ask one of my own."

"Yes, sir?" Her stomach was a coiled, burning knot.

"You said you are absolutely certain that Professor Snape could not have done this. Do you stand by this?"

The knot in her stomach loosened. This was a question she could answer. "Yes, I do," she answered without hesitation, her shoulders unconsciously straightening. "Professor Snape would never be so stupid. If he wanted to kill Potter, there are cleverer, more subtle ways of doing so, like slipping quinine into his dessert pudding. If Harry keeled over then, he could blame it on shoddy cooking."

"Been giving the matter a great deal of thought, have you?"

She froze, realizing how that must have sounded. "Oh, no, sir." Then, after a pause, "Well, yes, sir, but not...not like that," she murmured hastily.

"Oh, indeed not," the Headmaster agreed, and the shadow of a mischievous smile passed over his face. She blushed. "For what it is worth," he said, serious once more, "I agree whole-heartedly with you."

"At least someone does," she muttered, and though she had meant to sound sardonic, it emerged as a weary, relieved sigh.

"Alas, Professor Snape has not endeared himself to most of the students and teachers, I'm afraid." He smiled ruefully. "But that is neither here nor there. I said I could answer two of your questions, and so I shall. The poison that felled Harry is most likely cyanide."

She stared at him, her heart beginning to gallop in her chest. Here was something she could use, something she could hold in both greedy hands and investigate with books and further questions. "Cyanide, sir?" she repeated, and her hands twined restlessly around the covered bars of the cage on her lap, the fingers opening and closing in a persistent, peristaltic rhythm.

Her agitation did not go unnoticed. "Does that mean something to you, Rebecca?" The Headmaster sat straighter in his chair, his gaze cold steel.

"N-," she began.

But something niggled at the base of her brain, a bit of memory she could not place. She had read about cyanide before, though she couldn't say where or why. She remembered the book she had been reading, how it had crumbled beneath her fingers. It had been heavy, and as she wrangled with the recollection, phantom weight settled onto her numb legs, added its bulk to the heft of the cage.

It was an essay, she thought suddenly. An essay for Professor Snape. You were looking for a subject that might interest him, and you came across that book. You had gotten as far as cyanide before Neville and Seamus showed up. They interrupted you before you could finish.

What was the name of the book? She groped for it, desperate to pull it from the obscuring cloud of forgetfulness, but it would not come. It lodged just beyond the reach of her memory and offered her only a tantalizing flash of calligraphic script. She lunged for it, but it faded, and she was left with a vertiginous, nauseated lightness in her stomach, the same weightless emptiness that had seized her as she plummeted toward the floor from the library landing that same morning.

"I don't know, sir," she said at last. "Maybe. Maybe nothing. I read about it once, and something about it..." She hissed in frustration.

"I do not expect you recall everything at once," he soothed. "It is encouraging that you remember anything at all," he soothed. "Now you have a starting point from which to answer the remaining questions which you have so eloquently put forth."

Her lips twisted in a fleeting smile. "I suppose the next question would be, 'where did the poison come from?'"

"Professor Snape has reason to believe it came from his stores."

She gaped at him in incredulity. "But how? Professor Snape keeps all his toxins in a locked and warded cabinet, and he never leaves it unattended."

"That is the central question, isn't it, and as yet, I can find no answer."

"Neither can I, sir," she said quietly.

"However," he said briskly, "it won't do to concentrate on what we lack. No, better to focus on what we have, don't you agree?"

"Yes, sir." She longed for her bed.

"I told you I would answer two questions for you, and I will, but before I do, I'm afraid I must ask another small favor of you."

She stifled a groan and eyed him in dutiful silence. For someone who claimed to be sorry, he looked absolutely beatific. He was beaming at her, his eyes radiating unspoken glee, and his fingers, though still pressed flat upon the desk, twitched, organic tuning forks quivering with the thrill of tremendous magic. Years had fallen away from his face, the lines and grooves scoured away by his eagerness. In place of her wise Headmaster sat a mischievous boy keen to impart a secret, and she smiled in spite of her exhaustion.

"Of course, sir," she said, and prayed she was up to whatever task he gave her.

He opened a drawer and rummaged inside. After a moment, he plucked something from inside it and closed it again. "I was hoping you could look after something of great importance," he said, and handed her the object in his hand.

It took her a full thirty seconds to register what she was seeing. When she finally did, she began to shake, the tremors rattling her bones inside her skin, rolling from the soles of her feet to her solar plexus, and her hand spasmed around the piece of jade and silver it held. There was a sharp prick and a bead of warmth in her palm; the tiny fang had pierced her flesh.

"This is...is...," she stammered, unable to finish the thought that was filling her mind, emblazoning itself on her field of vision like a searing brand. She could not stop staring at the glint of polished silver concealed within her shivering, twitching fingers.

"Yes, it is," the Headmaster said mildly. "Will you be so kind as to look after it until this mystery is solved? Minister Fudge was most anxious that it be placed in trustworthy hands."

She was speechless. She gaped, first at her shaking fist, a fist that held Professor Snape's pride against her wounded palm, and then at the Headmaster, who was watching her in docile curiosity. A strangled hiccough was all she could manage.

"Miss Stanhope?" he pressed. "May I count on you?"

She nodded dumbly. The power of coherent human speech had deserted her, and her tongue was as graceless as stone inside her mouth. She pried her convulsing fingers from the gleaming metal that burned her hand like cold fire and stared at it. The tiny jade eyes looked back at her in wordless rebuke. Professor Snape would never stand for such useless histrionics, the little snake seemed to say, and she bit back a spate of hysterical laughter.

Calm down. No falling off the monkey bars now, of all times and places. Breathe.

She willed herself to relax, for the tremors to fade. She took slow, deep breaths, and with each measured lungful of air, she imagined allspice and parchment dust and robes of puritanical black. The vise grip that had crushed her chest in cold, cloying fingers eased, and as her thundering heartbeat returned to normal, she caught and fleeting glimpse of a chubby Auror writhing on the floor, his screams resounding off the impersonal walls of the Gryffindor Common room like infernal chamber music, and smiled.

He wasn't so lordly when we was finished with him, she heard him say, and looking down at the pin in her hand, she finally understood what he had meant. Her hand snapped closed around the silver serpent in a savagely protective grip, and the floundering incredulity in the pit of her stomach was replaced by steely resolve and a terrible, detached rage. There was only one thing left to know.

"Is he-is Professor Snape dead?" she asked in a queer, flat voice. All feeling seemed to have abandoned her, and save for the precious bit of metal pressed into her palm by sweaty fingers, she was unable to feel the rest of her body. She kept her gaze locked on the Headmaster's face, sure that if she looked down, she would find that she had left her mangled body behind like a shriveled husk.

The Headmaster made no answer. Instead, he rose from his desk and pocketed his wand. "Leave the owl here, Miss Stanhope, and come with me. I will have a house elf deliver it to the owlery for you. And keep that out of sight; it wouldn't do to have it seen." He gestured at the pin.

She placed her owl on the floor in front of his desk and stuffed the pin into the pocket of her robes, but she did not let it go. She clutched it between feverish fingers, afraid that if she let it go, it would vanish like tendrils of wood smoke, a cruel mirage born of frantic wish. She gripped her control stick and rolled to where the Headmaster waited, his hand resting lightly on the doorknob.

"Before we go, a bit of magic," he said, and with that he pulled out his wand and tapped her once on the thin crown of her head.

Heated aloe, she thought as the sensation washed over her in a sluggish, gelatinous wave. It's like the aloe treatments the nurses used to give you when they thought you might be getting bedsores.

It was not unpleasant, being wrapped in this viscous, warm cocoon, and she gave the fingers of her steering hand an experimental wiggle as the gelid heat oozed sedately down her bony forearm and twined itself seductively around her fingers. She was startled to realize that, though the outline of her fingers was still perfectly visible, she could see the worn, cracked knob of her control stick through them. She was, it appeared, transparent.

The Amazing Invisible Girl, she thought, her invisible fingers thrumming with awed excitement. Too bad you can still see the chair.

No sooner had the thought crossed her mind then the chair, too, began to dissolve. The control stick shimmered, as though she were seeing it through a veil of torpid desert heat, and then the room swallowed it up. Or so it seemed. One minute it was there, and the next she was goggling at the stone floor, the metal shaft to which the control stick was affixed jabbing the air like splintered bone.

The armrests went next, followed in quick succession by the seat, footrests, back and wheels, and as each part disappeared, she expect to fall to the floor in an ungainly heap, scrawny, flailing limbs akimbo, but her skinny shanks remained firmly planted three feet above the floor in defiance of all logic. An ebullient giggle escaped her.

"Quite splendid, isn't it? I find it most convenient for patrolling the castle and grounds late at night," he said cheerfully. "Off we go, then." He opened the door and stepped onto the spiraling staircase.

She followed obediently and winced when the guiding magnets gave a preternaturally loud click.

"Oh, dear. I had quite forgotten about that." The Headmaster's voice floated out of the darkness from somewhere ahead and to the right of her. "Nothing another Charm cannot remedy. Silencio wheelchair!"

There was a brilliant stream of purple light from the Headmaster's wand, and by its luminescent, wavering glow, she saw the distorted profile of his face and twin dots of cobalt blue. His eyes. They reminded her of spirit lights, ghosts of the devil's sprites sent to lure unsuspecting souls to their doom, and she was suddenly afraid, but then the swirling stairs and his face were plunged into obscurity once more, and the moment passed.

It was a surreal experience, rolling soundlessly down the corridor behind the Headmaster. Had not the edges of the pin she clutched so ferociously bitten into the tender flesh of her palm, she would have thought herself a ghost, but the minute heft of it throttled between her fingers kept her from succumbing to the illusion. She stayed as close as she dared, the tread of her front wheels scant inches from the hem of his robes, and more than once she was tempted to stretch forth her fingers and brush them against the smooth, shifting fabric, to reassure herself that she was still of this world, but that would mean surrendering her grip on the pin in her pocket, and that was a physical impossibility, and so she rolled on.

"Good evening." The Headmaster inclined his head to a young Auror lurking stalwartly outside the Corridor leading to the dungeons. The Auror made no reply, his face a mask of cool disdain, and from her vantage point, she saw him tighten his grip on his wand.

Bastard, she thought savagely, not because he had disrespected Dumbledore-in truth, she gave less than a damn about that-but because he was one of them, one of the soulless, blue-robed tyrants that had a hand in wresting the serpent in her hand from its rightful place on Professor Snape's collar. The lips she no longer had pulled from her teeth in a feral snarl of undisguised loathing, and her sweaty hand crushed the serpent. She was seized with the mad urge to charge him, to loose a primal, guttural bay of bloodlust and fly at him, ram the full force of her chair into his shins and listen as the bones shattered with a sound like breaking china. She would caper and gibber while he howled and clutched legs as mangled useless as hers, and before his cohorts came to drag her away to the forgotten bowels of Azkaban, she would spit in his face and laugh.

Tempting as the vision was, she knew it would achieve nothing, and so, with a pang of bilious regret, she settled for sparing him a flat, sidelong gaze and kept moving. The Headmaster, undaunted by the Auror's unrepentant rudeness, trundled into the Potions corridor, and as she followed in his wake, she wondered what question he hoped to answer by bringing her here. Aside from the fact that Professor Snape no longer presided over it, the classroom had changed not a whit.

Well, that changes everything, doesn't it?

Yes, yes, it does.

But what difference did it make? Different as the classroom may have become psychologically, everything about it was as it had ever been. The desks and benches were unmoved, as were the alembics and spare cauldrons. The Headmaster took special care to be sure that the stores remained alphabetized and neat, just as Professor Snape had always kept them. She had been in the classroom since the Aurors had stormed the castle like a horde of rapacious locusts, and she had noted absolutely nothing out of the ordinary beyond the oppressive absence of her customary taskmaster.

Have you really been looking? Methinks your eyes have been so distracted by what is missing that you cannot see what is there. Perhaps it's time to take a fresh look.

What was there to find? It was doubtless the Aurors had scoured every nook and cranny of that room in search of evidence and further indictment against their intended quarry, and whatever was to be found had been carted away for closer scrutiny at their leisure as the pondered ways to turn it to their favor. The three key pieces of evidence-Potter, the phial, and the hapless Professor Snape-had been dispersed to the four winds, and the traces of the crime that might have remained after the Aurors had departed had long since been scrubbed away by industrious house elves and oblivious, trampling feet, including her own churning wheels.

You never know, her mind persisted. Maybe it will jog your memory.

She had little hope for that, tired as she was, but she would do it anyway, if for no other reason than the Headmaster wanted her to, and it was better than sitting idly by while time marched inexorably onward. She would wander around the room and try to remember anything other than bleak obsidian eyes and classmates with lupine faces and bloody, gaping jaws. She might even crawl over the frozen stone floor, scrape her knees raw as she made furious, hopeless obeisance to the ghosts within the walls, and maybe, just maybe, if she offered enough flesh, a piece of the puzzle would fall into place.

They neared the Potions classroom and she slowed in anticipation, but to her surprise, he continued down the corridor to another door. The door to Professor Snape's quarters, as a matter of fact.

Here? What are we doing here? Her heart hammered against her ribcage, and her throat felt dry and scalded. We shouldn't be here. They won't like it.

They, of course, were the pair of Aurors that had been stationed outside the door since Professor Snape was relieved of his duties. She had seen them both before; Dawlish had been with Madam Toad on the night of her questioning, and the other had been present on the day Professor Snape had been unceremoniously ousted from his classroom. She despised the former, a spineless sycophant, and as to the latter, he earned her unbridled loathing by virtue of the robes he wore. She scowled at both of them and veered closer to Dumbledore, unnerved despite her invisibility.

"Good evening, Kingsley," murmured the Headmaster, and the tall, black Auror gave a genteel nod.

"Headmaster," he responded.

"Dawlish," Dumbledore greeted the other, his voice considerably cooler.

For a moment, Dawlish continued to stare stonily at the torch on the opposite wall, and then he turned his head, his movement a slow, delirious arc. His mouth wrenched itself into a semblance of a smile, and before his lips slackened anew, she saw a flash of angry red gums.

"Headmaster." Dawlish gave a jerky nod.

Something's wrong with him, she thought flatly. He's had a stroke. He wasn't like this before.

She stared at him. With his close-cropped grey hair, glazed eyes, and corpse-like grimace, he reminded her of Howdy Doody in the hands of a madman, and she shifted uneasily in her seat. The Headmaster, however, showed no demonstrable concern for the slack-jawed Auror. He simply opened the door, stepped inside, and bade her follow him.

"Headmaster," she said as soon as he closed the door behind her, "there's something wrong with-,"

But just then, she caught sight of the figure on the sofa, and all questions withered in her throat. The serpent pin escaped her nerveless grasp and slithered to the furthest corner of her pocket. She was only dimly aware of the Headmaster muttering "Finite incantatem!" and grazing his wand over her scalp. The world had narrowed to black robes and a starched white collar, to elegant alabaster fingers and smoldering black eyes.

"Professor Snape," she croaked.