Summon the Lambs to Slaughter

Chapter Forty-Two

At half-past six on Sunday morning, Rebecca found herself and a bleary-eyed, tousle-haired Neville in the owlery. Neville was still in his woolen nightclothes, and Trevor the toad hunkered cozily in one trouser pocket. The owls, disgruntled by such an early morning intrusion, filled the frigid morning air with indignant hoots, beak-clicking, and the dusty, rustling flap of wings. Feathers floated from the rafters and carpeted the litter of bones, tiny, desiccated corpses, and ancient, moldering droppings.

"What're we doin' hur?" Neville muttered, his voice still fuzzy with sleep, and he swiped the back of his hand over his slumber-swollen eyes.

"I needed privacy, and once this is done, I'll need to send it off as quickly as possible." She flapped a blank piece of parchment at him as she settled herself into the remotest corner with a snort of icy breath.

"Privacy?" he repeated, interest seeping in to dispel the phlegmatic thickness of his voice, and he blinked owlishly at her.

"That's what I said," she answered tersely, but a bemused grin danced briefly across her face. "Can't exactly go writing seditious letters in full view of the governmental authorities, now, can I?" She rummaged in the pocket of her robes for her Dicta-Quill.

"No, I suppose not," he said at length, and ambled over and crouched beside her, haunches hovering like an eclipsing sun over a dune of crumbling mouse bones. Trevor gave an indolent croak from the pocket of his trousers. "Why do you need me with you to write a letter?" No bitterness or condescending amusement, only honest curiosity.

Her amusement faded, and her face hardened. "Because what I'm about to do can be some bad juju," she said bluntly.

He shifted uneasily on his haunches, and the carpet of bones beneath his feet crackled and popped in a sympathetic susurration of trepidation. "What do you mean?" he asked, and when she turned to meet his gaze, she saw that all traces of lethargy had been supplanted by blossoming fear.

You don't really want to know.

She smoothed the piece of parchment over her knees with cold efficiency as she spoke. "When I was at D.A.I.M.S, we had a game, a ritual. We called it the Story. Not everyone played it; it was secret, something the nurses and the doctors and the shrinks couldn't regulate, and we liked it that way. We protected it. It was ours, the Storytellers'." She tapped the point of her quill against the parchment.

"The Storytellers?" He surrendered the losing battle with gravity and plopped beside her with a fleeting moue of distaste at the sound of crunching bone.

She nodded, and a smile that did not reach her eyes spread across her face, predatory and humorless as death. "That's what we called ourselves, the nine of us. The Storytellers."

"Why?"

She spared him a pained, sidelong glance. "Because that's what we did. We told the Story, or rather, the Story let itself be told. We lost control of it once it started. We were the instruments for the Story, but we didn't make it, if that makes sense. We were just the conduits. It used us. And we liked it."

"I don't understand," he said, and though he was too polite to say so, he clearly thought she had left the land of rationality behind by several turns. His eyes were locked onto her face, earnestly searching for signs of fatigue or impending insanity.

"I know you don't," she said, and it was true. She had not expected him to understand any of this. No one could, save those who had lived it, those who had helped feed it.

"Do you take Magical Theory or Arithmancy?" she asked. She had never seen him in any of her lessons, but it couldn't hurt to ask. Perhaps he had received home tutelage. If his grandmother was as ambitious as he claimed, it was entirely possible she had tried to cram the onerous and esoteric subject down his browbeaten throat.

He scoffed. "Never. Smart enough to know I'm too thick for it. Besides, it's dry and dead. I like getting my hands into things, feeling them, seeing them. Maybe that's why I like Herbology-I can see the plant grow. That stuff is all theory, and you never get to see evidence of it."

Behind the neutral, courteous façade of her face, she boggled at his stupidity. Arithmancy, dry and dead? Fool. He saw no further than his eyes, then. Yes, it was numbers and theorems and formulae, tedious minutiae, most of it, but it was the key to the vibrant, pulsing life that thrummed beneath his feet and coaxed the green things from the soil. It was the cornerstone, the nucleus of the magic that coursed through his veins and dripped from each wall and parapet of the castle in an almost visible mist. Arithmancy harnessed raw magic to bring forth usable spells from the void, and in the most deft of hands, it could show every possibility of every event in a person's life. He who controlled Arithmancy, who could roll dem bones, controlled the world.

She said none of this to him, however. If he could not sense it after being bombarded by the magic of the castle for the past five years, then no amount of lecturing would change that. She didn't understand how he couldn't comprehend it, quite frankly. The unadorned truth of it throbbed in the small of her back like a constant cramp. The raw, untapped power of this place was staggering, terrifying and heady, and yet he never noticed the sleeping monolith that dreamt beneath his feet. It was incomprehensible.

"Magical theory or not, you know that for every ounce of magic that wizards are able to refine and control, there are four they can't," she said, and stretched her stiff legs until they shuddered with the tingling warmth of increased blood flow. "Some theoreticians think that magic is a fundamental part of the earth, a fifth element comprised of the other four. Magic derives it power from earth, wind, water, and fire and can be used to control any of those elements in turn. Spells, to put it bluntly."

"The most widely accepted theory goes that magic, since it is a conglomeration of the four most primal and unpredictable forces in the universe, must be inherently volatile as well. That's why only certain people can practice magic. They're sensitive and sturdy enough to channel it through their bodies without damage to themselves. Those who are too dull or too delicate never know it's there and are Muggles."

"You read all of this?" asked Neville incredulously.

She shrugged. "Read it, heard it in lecture. Reading about magic is one of the few things of which D.A.I.M.S. approved. I suppose they thought that if we didn't read about it, we'd do something dangerous, like experiment, but they forgot. They got arrogant." She lapsed into thoughtful silence.

"Forgot what?" He scuffed the toe of one trainer through the mantle of dust that lay over the bones like a gritty shroud.

"That for every ounce of magic wizardkind has tamed, four more elude their grasp. And we found the motherlode in that damned basement." She tittered, a mirthless sound, dry cornhusks in an arid, scorching breeze.

D.A.I.M.S., for being a school of witchcraft and wizardry, was one of the most magically sterile places she'd ever been in. They smothered it, papered it over with machines and plaster and miles of linoleum and tile. The walls rebuffed magic rather than absorbing it. It wasn't like Hogwarts, where every stone bled magic; it was dead, a corpse rotting from the inside out.

But that basement-that basement was something else entirely, a pocket of magic that they couldn't throttle, no matter how thick the fire doors. It hurt to go in there sometimes because the magic was so thick. It made your teeth vibrate, tingle like they did when you drew too near a power line, and some of them left with blood drying under their noses and the taste of metal shavings in their mouths. They always went, though; they had to because that was where they told the Story.

It was alive, ravenously alive, sentient, or so she had always suspected. To this day, she wasn't sure if it drew its magic from the generations of Storytellers that had woven their elemental magic there, or if it had, in fact, served as the touchtone for what they had done there, a deep, black reservoir from which they had drawn their strength. Neither possibility appealed to her, and the truth was, she didn't really want to know. Some things were better left undisturbed.

Back then, they hadn't worried about such things. They were children playing a game, a game that passed the time and thumbed their collective nose at the draconian authority figures that regimented their lives with latex-covered fists. It was fun and harmless and helped them cope with the hopeless monotony of bed checks, showers, high colonics, and inspections of their daily bowel output. It was also a secret, and because they were permitted so few of those, they clung to it with tenacious, jealous fingers.

There had been nine of them, never more and never less, and every Friday, after the midnight bed check, they filed to the basement in a soundless, somnolent line, wraiths in pursuit of illicit deeds. All of them rollers of the bones and readers of the runes, and all of them eager for the swell of magic that was so akin to more carnal pleasures. Past the traitorous, dim lights of the medicinal hallways, around the silhouetted phantoms of the uncomfortable, stringently utilitarian furniture, wheels and crutch tips and pneumatic legs complicit in their utter lack of noise. Down the narrow, rotting, wooden steps, offering their frail bodies to the mercurial, gaping maw of the basement.

It stank of mildew and damp rot, and the bric-a-brac of one hundred and fifty years was strewn over the pocked cement floor-warped parallel bars, half-deflated therapy balls, moldering mats, even a rusted pair of iron legs braces, harbingers of crueler, more medieval days. They made tracks and divots in the dust as they maneuvered their unwieldy steel and titanium bodies into a loose circle and crunched the brittle carapaces of cockroaches and beetles under foot and tread.

And in that circle, fingertip to fingertip, they wove the magic that took them away from the pain and the indignity and into a world where they walked on sturdy, springbok legs and breathed through lungs unscarred by cystic fibrosis. The mildewed walls and gritty floors fell away, usurped by rolling meadows green as fantasy emeralds, sweltering jungles, frigid tundras, and roiling, windswept seas. Phantom feet left footprints in lands of invention, and, with one collective wish, one joint push, they could fly and leave the world behind.

This magic had no formal name and only one tool. Words. Human speech was the cloth from which these worlds had been crafted. Stitch by stitch, syllable by syllable, they gave form to the void and lost themselves in it. They were carried away on the voice of the chosen Storyteller for that night, and with every word he spoke, the magic grew stronger, more virulent. Soon, what had started as a child's pastime became addiction, and eventually, before the Story was told for the last time and the basement shunned as a tainted place, it had become a curse.

Listen, my children, and you shall hear a tale of woe and untold fear. That was the way it had always started, an invocation as old as rime, an invitation to come and watch the magic whorl and spin around them all, close as a shroud, and they had gone eagerly. In the blind hours before dawn and the four a.m. bed check, they battled ogres and trolls, slew hordes of enemy soldiers, and felled untold monstrosities of the sea. Their imaginary blades had been slick with blood, and they had reveled in the righteous bloodletting.

Maybe things would have remained unchanged had they never decided to assign names to the breathing blade fodder that was their enemies, but someone-Jerold Hawkins, likely-had, on a whim, labeled one of the characters in the ongoing tale of knight-errantry The Weakling. The moment the words had left his mouth, everyone knew to whom he was referring, and the grim, sallow, pimpled visage of Judith Pruitt had emblazoned itself on the retina of their collective eye.

She had suspected then that they should have stopped, should have roused themselves from the ecstatic thrall of the Story's magic, but the lure was too strong, and the dark and gibbering imp of her bitter subconscious had wanted to see just how far the Story could be pushed, so she had ignored the panicked, warning lurch in the pit of her stomach, closed her eyes to shut out Jackson Decklan's pinched, ashen face, and let the threads of the Story twine themselves around her pounding heart.

Dirt between her toes, soft and wet, pleasantly cool. Though years had elapsed since that terrible night when everything spiraled out of control, that she still remembered with perfect clarity. On the last night the Story was told, she was running with cool, loamy earth between her toes. Running because-

"We did something we shouldn't have, played a game we had neither the knowledge nor the skill to play, and it nearly caught us in the end. Only dumb luck and brass got us out, and we never played again," she said brusquely, forcing her mind away from skeletons best left undisturbed if it could be helped.

"What's that got to do with your letter?' he asked.

"Because I think, Neville, dear, that it's time to play again," she said, her voice leaden and ineffably weary.

He goggled at her in undisguised stupefaction. "But why? If it's as dangerous as you make it out to be, why would you want to?" His pudgy face was taut with worry.

"Want to? I don't want to. If I had my druthers, I'd have the memory of it burned from my mind. Curious as I am, I'm certain that was the one secret I never should have learned. Curiosity killed the cat, and no satisfaction can bring him back," she crooned in a wry singsong.

"Then why-,"

"Because I have no other choice. I'm not Harry Potter, Super Wizard, Boy of a Thousand Gifts. I have no Invisibility Cloak to conceal me, and some of the things I have to do are unpardonable sins in the Church of Gryffindor, even the Church of Me, come to think of it, and if I have to sell myself, then I might as well take it as far and as deep as it goes." She scrubbed her face with her hands.

"Is it Dark magic?" He shifted on the small hillock of bones, as though he were trying to put a few precious inches of life-saving space between them in case she said yes.

"There is no Dark magic, no Light magic. Magic just is. It's how we use it that makes it good or evil. Even a Summoning Charm could be used for evil." She stifled a yawn.

"If you say so. Sounds like Dark wizard philosophy to me." There was no accusation, only honest bewilderment.

"The greatest trick of any despot or villain is to tell just enough of the truth to be dangerous." She flexed her fingers and winced as the knuckles cracked like fractured ice. "Look, Neville, you don't have to do this. You can call me crazy as a loon and leave, and I'll think no less of you. Honestly, if I were in your shoes, that's precisely what I would do. This whole idea is absolutely mad, but it's the only one I've got."

She meant every word she said. She wouldn't begrudge him if he turned tail and fled to the safe, warm, rational world of the Gryffindor Common Room. She wanted to do the same thing herself. The warning claxons of prudence and self-preservation were loud and shrill inside her head, had been since she had awakened at half-past four with the idea coalescing in her sleep-fogged mind. Even then, she had told herself that it was suicide, but she had barged into the fifth-year boys' dormitory and dragged him out of bed anyway, pretending not to notice Harry's empty bed and Ron Weasley's equally vacant eyes as he stared out the iced tower windows.

Even so, she hoped he wouldn't choose the safer road. If he did, she would not leave the owlery, not alive, at any rate. They would bring her frozen, stiffening body out on a covered bier, a starched linen sheet covering her bulging, glazed eyes and the screaming, grinning rictus of her blue-lipped mouth. An attentive bearer might notice the deep crescents gouged into the flesh of her palms, might note that her fingernails had been torn to the quick, but never bled. Others might realize that the contents of her bladder had dried and frozen on her thighs in pale yellow crystals, but none of them would ever stop to ponder what it all meant. A stroke or a gran mal seizure, they would say, and they would carry her away. Dumbledore would make a somber, grey-faced announcement in the Great Hall at dinner, a letter of condolence would be sent to her presumably grief-stricken parents, and that would be that. Rebecca Stanhope would cease to exist, and the process of forgetting would begin.

"I don't suppose I could talk you out of this?" he asked dolefully.

"I afraid not." She gave him a wan smile.

"Didn't think so, but I had to try, you know." He ran his fingers through tousled hair. "What do I do?"

Stun me and drag me back to the castle before I open a Pandora's box that I was lucky enough to close once before. Shout from the rooftops that I'm out here screwing with Arithmancy, Runes, and Cryptology in ways that God never intended and that never would have been discovered had not nine rebellious cripples spent their Friday nights creeping down to the old storage basement. Run screaming for the Headmaster at the top of your lungs. Drag Madam Toad out here by the hand if you can't find anyone else. Do anything but what I tell you.

"Just talk to me. It doesn't matter what you say-you can recite the alphabet for all I care. All I need is your voice. It'll act as an anchor." She rolled away from him and positioned her chair in the center of the room.

"Anchor?"

She nodded. It'll help me find my way back." He started to ask another question, but she cut him off with a brusque jerk of her head. "Not now. When it's over. Whatever you do, don't stop talking. Each word acts like a breadcrumb, and I need to follow the trail to come home. If you freeze, I'll lose sight of the line between vision and reality, and once it's lost, it's nigh-impossible to find again. "Do you understand?'

He nodded, and his face had attained the hue of spoiled curds. "I'm not so sure I'm the man for this," he muttered, his eyes fixed on the toes of his trainers. "You need someone like Hermione. She's first rate at all this mental huggermugger."

"Hermione," she spat. "It'll be a cold day in Hell before I trust her with something like this. Snotty little bunt'd probably leave me trapped inside my own mind and call it comeuppance for my ruthless oppression of house elves."

"Bunt?" Neville repeated blankly.

"Yeah, bunt." When he continued to regard her with slate-faced incomprehension, she said, "Isn't that what Malfoy called me in the Great Hall once?" A terrible suspicion was taking shape at the base of her brain, and a heated flush was spreading from the bridge of her nose to the tips of her earlobes, unfurling like the petals of a late-blooming rose.

"Bun-," he breathed, and then his befuddled expression gave way to a warbling guffaw.

He shook with laughter, hands planted on his knees, the soft bulge of his paunch jiggling with tiny seismic tremors of merriment. Beads of perspiration dripped from his pale forehead and left minute portholes to the cleanliness of earlier days on the floor. He gave a watery snort and swiped his dripping nose on the sleeve of his robes.

"Hunh hunh," he hiccoughed. "Oh, Merlin, oh, sweet Persephone." He straightened, one hand clutching his wobbling stomach. I think the word you're looking for is bint, Rebecca." He wiped his streaming eyes on the back of his hand. "You haven't called anyone that, have you?"

"No, thank God." She studied the slender shaft of the Dicta-Quill in her hand.

"Your secret is safe with me," he assured her, and clapped her on the shoulder.

"Which one?" she asked quietly.

He sobered immediately and stuffed his hands into the pockets of his robes. "All of them," he said gravely. "I know how important it is to keep a secret, remember?"

"Thank you," she said, a hard lump of gratitude wedged in her throat like a pebble. Then she blinked the emotion away and stiffened in her chair. "Give me forty-five minutes. If I don't come out of this by then, go straight to Dumbledore," she said gruffly.

He nodded and retreated to the hillock of disintegrating bones. She clutched the Dicta-Quill in numb, matchstick fingers, pressed the tip to the parchment spread over her knees, and waited, and when she heard him begin to recite the alphabet in a reverent whisper, she bowed her head.

"Come my children, and you shall hear a tale of woe and darkest sin." The invocation scrawled itself on the parchment, and though she had filled the quill with black ink, it reminded her of blood. She took a shallow, shuddering breath and curled the fingers of her free hand around the armrest of the chair. "Lies and blood and treacheries shall be revealed; have no fear, for there are neither sinners nor secrets here. Gather round now, my little ones, and take my hand. The Story has begun and must be borne unto its end. No retreat, no more reprieve. Away now, away now, the truth to see."

Her stomach was a roiling pit of nausea, whipsawing beneath her lungs like a greasy hammock, and she was sure she was going to vomit all over the parchment, coat it with a gelatinous gruel of half-digested porridge and bile. The quill flew across the page, and the words left in its industrious, obliging wake seared her retinas with a syrupy, amber light. She closed her eyes to block them out. If she didn't have to see what was happening, maybe it wouldn't be so terrible, so perverse.

It was a lie, of course, but she had learned over the short span of her life that sometimes lies were all that helped you hang on. People who could not suffer the lies of another could quite happily lie to themselves if it meant that there would be another day, another week, another month to get it right. Her parents and the parents of her friends consoled themselves with the hopeless delusion that their children would be whole someday, that one miraculous day they would simply spring from their chairs, toss their crutches and walkers aside, tear their tracheal tubes from their throats, and proclaim, "I am healed, lo, hosanna, glory to God in the Highest, Amen!" Deep down, they knew it wasn't so, but if they could pretend there was hope, then they could get up in the morning, go to work, and not think about the tastes of gunmetal and whiskey.

She was no stranger to the practice herself. Each day, she told herself that she would not hate, would not let her heart turn to ash and wormwood, and each day, the bitterness grew and the emotional jaundice spread. Hogwarts and Professor Snape had arrested the progression of the disease, but it was still there, stretching forth voracious, insidious fingers, raking infected nails across the atrophied flesh of her heart. Despite all of that, she told the lie anew every morning and whispered it again as she drifted to uneasy dreams at night because to admit the truth was to concede defeat, and cynical as she was, she was not yet weary of the race.

So she told herself that little white lie, just as she had sworn that she would never tell the Story again. She had even gone so far as to help the others seed the basement with salt before they shunned it forever. Never again, they swore, as salt sifted through their fisted fingers like dead fairy dust, but their eyes had told the truth their lips would not, and as she had stared across the circle at Jackson Decklan's averted eyes, thinking, I do believe in spooks, I do believe in spooks, she had known it was a tie that could not possibly bind.

Now the flimsy tie had broken, severed by distance and necessity, and she was sitting in an owlery with no more protection but what brass and a lovable, addled boy could offer. It was madness, and she was afraid of it, but she lusted for it, too. She was as alive as she had ever been, the adrenaline hot and electric in her veins, and even as she told herself for the twentieth time that she hoped it wouldn't work, a wild, gleam of anticipation kindled in her eyes.

You do want it. Deep down in that dirty, unacknowledged part of your soul that has seen neither the light nor the restraining hand of compassion, you've been waiting for this, hoping for it. You never wanted anything bad to happen to anyone, but now that it has, it's the perfect excuse to touch the forbidden, to exercise the power Vector is always keeping just out of your reach. He knows, you see, knows how dangerous, how addictive it can be, and so do you. That's why you tried to stop, an alcoholic taking those first, tottering steps down the road to perdition. You know, but it feels too good, and you like the power it gives you.

It's just Arithmancy and Runes and the ancient art of storytelling. It's a game of chance, nothing more. What happened in the basement happened only once. It probably will never happen again, and even if it does, there's no guarantee that what I see is the truth. At best, it will be what is most likely to happen, and we both know that life is rarely so obliging. It might not even work without the rest of them.

Oh, but that was just wishful thinking. Already the cocoon was weaving itself around her, cutting her off from the outside world. Neville was three feet and another world away, and the subdued hiss of his voice was meaningless. Raw magic pooled in the soles of her feet and in the crooks of her elbows. Her forearms shivered with the energy gathering there, and she grimaced. It was going to work, all right, and she wondered for the first time if she could physically handle the stress of it all by herself.

There had been others to bear the load before, and so it had never occurred to her just how powerful the magic in which they were dabbling had been. Now, with the ritual barely begun, the enormity of the load was apparent. Her eyes bulged with the weight of the gathering magic, and her ears popped and crackled with the pressure. Her sinuses had been stuffed with wet gauze. The quill trembled in her white-knuckled grip.

She had heard tales in History of Magic lessons of early witches and wizards being torn apart or immolated by uncontrolled magic, and a vision arose in her mind of herself imploding beneath the unbridled magic, wet flaps of skin and bleeding tissue splattering against the walls with a gelid smack. In her mind's eye, Neville was frozen in place, lips still pursed to say p, and droplets of blood and grue clung to the tips of his hair. From the tip of his nose hung a scrap of grey brain matter. The image was horrible and obscenely hilarious at the same time, and a hysterical, appalled giggle bubbled in her throat.

The magic had enfolded her completely, and everything in the owlery had taken on a queer, canted quality, an image viewed through heat-warped glass. She was convinced that if she pressed her palm to the air in front of her, it would mold itself to her hand, and when she withdrew it, her palm print would still hang before her eyes in ghostly reminder of where she had been.

Like the lightning bolt in the village the day everything came unglued, she thought suddenly, and shuddered.

Another memory surfaced in her mind. A lightning bolt that hung suspended in dead and odorless air. It should have dissolved in a blinding flash of light, swallowed by the grinding roar of thunder and the metallic stink of ozone, but it never did. In defiance of all natural laws, it hovered in a tumorous black sky, a jagged white-blue rend that had made her wet her pants.

Skeletal white fingers and a voice like crunching gravel. Someone screaming to beat the band. And mud squelching between cramping, fleeing toes as she ran from the thing on the grass, the thing with a pariah's face, and toward the guttering beacon of sanity, and mildewed, plaster walls. And two days later, the language of the bones made clear.

She shook the thoughts aside and re-established her grip on the shaft of her quill. It wouldn't do to think of that just now, not when walled in by magic that might not let her go. She was going to need all of her strength to come home again; she could spare none battling poisoned reminiscences. She cast one last look at Neville, who was still dutifully reciting the alphabet through lips the color of spoiled liver, and closed her eyes.

Here's to hoping we're both strong enough, she thought, and surrendered herself to the magic.

The sound did not fade gradually from her plane of consciousness. It was simply gone. Only the haunting, echoing whisper of Neville's voice remained in the tranquil white noise void, constant, low, and soothing, steady as the ticking of a clock. A, B, C... All thought and fear faded from her mind, and she felt only contentment and serene confidence. It was all right, of course it was; the magic would not hurt her. It was hers for the taking to do with as she would, and she wanted to see.

She had done this a thousand times before, in Vector's class and back at D.A.I.M.S. Thousandth verse, same as the first. No sweat. The formulas came to her, her secret mother tongue, and as she manipulated them with nimble, unseen fingers, the shining tendrils of possibilities past and present unspooled before her, delicate wisps of maybe. Pink for future, green for past. Millions of them twined and coiled in lazy, sensuous rhythm, billions. As she watched, pink turned green, future becoming past. Time held sway even here.

She sifted with agile fingers, careful not to look at the threads that passed between her fingers. If she succumbed to the temptation to gaze at each past secret she held in her hands, she would never leave. She would wither and crumble to dust, and Neville, stalwart as he was, would fade with her. Besides, she did not need to look at the gossamer threads to find what she sought. She would know when she touched it.

On and on it went, and the search settled into a languid, peaceful rhythm. Touch and release, touch and release, until the movement became automatic. The whole of existence had been reduced to an endless, undulating sea of green and pink, kelp and red tide. Neville's voice was a dissonant, instinct drone. Touch and release, and with each deft move movement, she cradled a piece of time in her palm.

Touch. A black, formless void.

Touch. Burning desert sand and the tombs of kings.

Touch. A bared breast and the sweet, killing bite of an asp's fangs. An empire in ruins.

Touch. Steel-bellied beasts rain fire from the heavens, and Dresden burns, screaming human wicks staggering through the cratered streets.

Touch.

Acid and chilled steel beneath her palm. She clenched her teeth against the surge of energy that clawed its way up her forearm and stabbed her temple. The power in her hands was incalculable, a writhing, pernicious serpent that would destroy her if it could. It convulsed within her desperate grip, and though the magic had no voice, she understood its meaning all the same. This is not for you. Be gone from here.

She had found the thread she sought, found the day of Potter's collapse and Professor Snape's fall from grace. Now she had only to break the cardinal rule of Arithmancy and look at what she held. She was not surprised that she felt no apprehension as her mental eye drifted toward the crackling, bucking strand of time locked between her unyielding fingers, only a dizzy anticipation. She had defied the devil before and escaped by the skin of her teeth, and what she had once done for fun she must now do in earnest.

Prudence tried one last time to dissuade her from her fool's errand, but its voice was tinny and impotent, easily smothered by the mantle of magic that felt so much like Professor Snape's traveling cloak, and so, with benefit of neither prayer nor caution, she gazed at the strand in her hand.

"Let the Story be told," she whispered, and let the world disintegrate.

For a moment, she was suspended between the worlds, bobbing weightlessly in an amniotic sac of blind timelessness. She was neither here nor there; she existed only because she knew she did and because the soft mantra of Neville's alphabet still floated out of the nothingness in disembodied reassurance. Lose either her self-awareness or the comforting clew of Neville's voice, and she would cease to be, snuffed like a guttering candle flame between oblivious, pinching fingers.

Then she landed with an indecorous, teeth-clacking thud on gritty, biting stone, her robes puddled lasciviously around her hips. She was in the dungeons, sprawled in the corner nearest the door like a broken, disjointed doll. She was, in fact, right beside her waking self, a willful shadow with the breath of life breathed into its nostrils by a dark and capricious god. She froze, hands pressed flat to the floor on either side of her body, and stared at the misshapen shell she called home.

Angles and shadows and secrets well-kept, that's what crippled girls are made of, she thought as she gazed dispassionately at her own face.

She raised herself into a low crouch and scuttled toward the lectern. Such subterfuge was unnecessary, but she could not shake the unease that settled over her like a cloying blanket, the irrational sense that her presence had profaned this place. She hunkered behind the lectern, fingers gripping the solid edge of the wood. Or at least she thought she was. Her eyes told her that she was grasping the smooth wood between her fingers, but there was no corresponding sensory input from her befuddled fingers, no heft of wood or the satin slick of varnish. It was as though they had been anesthetized. She willed them to move, and they wiggled at the end of her hand, pallid strands of seaweed in a lazy current, but there was no commensurate tug of tendon beneath her skin.

Something else was amiss, too. She was squatting less than six inches from Professor Snape, and she could not smell him. Where his exotic allspice and parchment dust scent should have been, there was instead a sharp, sour mint smell that reminded her of freshly cut paper. She wrinkled her nose and recoiled, rocking precariously on the balls of her feet. She hated it. It was the smell of hospital linens and paper toilet seat covers, the smell of absolute sterility, and it did not belong on Professor Snape. He was the antithesis of all those things; he-and his classroom-smelled of earth and anise and warm wool. This Snape and this room were as close and stale as a forgotten attic.

This isn't Snape, and that isn't Harry. They are nearly two weeks away from here, one locked in his rooms, and the other lying in state in the Hospital Wing. These are just holographic representations of Arithmantic algorithims extracted from the temporal thread, and numbers, for all their accuracy and cold efficiency, cannot convey the subtle nuances behind the angle of nose and the parabola of lips. Some things-like the way Professor Snape smells-just are, and no amount of calibration can duplicate them.

She supposed that was true, but she made no move to draw closer to the cluster of calculations currently masquerading as her Potions Master. If she did, she might touch him, and she knew it would not be pleasant. She would either feel nothing but uniform resistance, or he would feel like hollowed papier-mache, and either possibility would send her into paroxysms of hysterical screaming. It would be too much like touching a corpse, brushing fingertips with lifeless, remorseless probability, and that was more than her overtaxed mind could shoulder. She balled the hand not clutching the textureless lectern into a fist and slid it beneath her shanks.

Things happened very quickly after that. Everything proceeded just as she knew it would. Harry plodded to the front of the room beneath the professor's smoldering, triumphant gaze, and from her fresh vantage point, she afforded a view of Ron Weasley's indignant, scandalized face and Hermione Granger's prim moue of disapproval. Despite the grim circumstances, she snickered. They looked more like virginal harridans witnessing a peep show than students watching a Potions demonstration.

Maybe they knew this was coming.

The implications of the thought made her stomach clench with apprehension, and she shoved it away with an ill-tempered grunt and returned her scrutiny to the sea of expectant faces in front of her. Draco Malfoy was perched in his eyrie, bookended by his slack-jawed, thick-browed lackeys. The astringent logic of numbers had stripped him, too, of his alluring vitality, drained the preternatural glow from his crown of platinum hair, but he was still resplendent as he watched his nemesis shuffle to his fate, a lord at the execution of a particularly bothersome rival, and even in this cold, dead parody of the Potions classroom, a shiver of lust wracked her.

Potter reached for the phial of milky liquid, and then the door crashed open with a flat bang that dropped into immediate silence, and Colin Creevey burst in, a blur of crisp, black robes and pale, excited face. He was practically dancing as he skidded into the room, and he careened into the corner of the desk. So began the dreamy, eternal fall of the Advanced Sleeping Draught.

Her field of vision narrowed to the plummeting phial as it tumbled end over end toward the unforgiving stone floor. Even Professor Snape's outthrust, desperate hand could not distract her from the slender tube's delirious descent. This was what she had been waiting to see. Her heart galloped inside her chest as it pumped more blood to the veins behind her eyes, and her nerveless hand was gripping the lectern hard enough to drive splinters into her fingers.

This is it. This is where the answers lie.

Another, softer voice spoke inside her head. The serpent, bitten by his own fangs, poisoned by his own well-nurtured venom. The King, felled by treachery. The Knights, paralyzed by fear. The Dark Dauphin, watching all with laughing, quicksilver eyes. The Mongoose, ever vigilant in the service of her old enemy, deceived before her very eyes. The Messenger, harbinger of calamity. Thus be named all the pieces; wherefore lies the truth?

She shrieked as a surge of magic tore through her body like electrical current. She pitched forward, throwing out her hands to keep her face from slamming into the stone floor, and something warm and wet gushed from her nose in an alarming freshet. She groaned and rolled onto her side, and the wetness from her nose dribbled onto her chin, thick and slow as black currant molasses. She raised a shaking hand to her face and drew it away to find dull, claret blood smeared over her fingers. She let them drop to the floor with a meaty, indifferent thud.

I'm bleeding, she thought with a swoon of dazed, wry humor. Then, a darker thought. This is what the Story feels like when you play by yourself. Oh, Jesus, it's like being in a decompression chamber run amok. I'm coming apart from the inside out. How long until my internal organs liquefy and my eyeballs burst like overripe grapes? I should never have done this by myself. It's too big. I should have asked Dumbledore to let me do this in his office. Damn my stubborn pride. She groaned as another wave of magic crushed her in an iron grip, and drops of blood oozed from beneath her fingernails.

Stop whinging, girl, said her grandfather gruffly, but it was exhortation rather than rebuke. You've done this before, for hours at a time, in fact. Push it back.

She retched, and thin, yellow bile joined the small but expanding pool of crimson on the floor. There were nine of us then. Nine of us holding up the world, and a ninth of the load is a far cry from the whole of it. She writhed as a cramp seized her lower back in vicious, twisting hands.

Yes, and between the nine of you, you'd be lucky to hold up a five-pound sack of flour, he snapped. Yet you managed to create and sustain a world fashioned from nothing more than words and fancy for hours at a time, and you did it every week for years on end. If you can do that-and you could and did for a long damn time-you can do this. Just shut out the pain and push the magic away.

Easier said than done, you bossy old coot, she thought peevishly, and dug her bleeding, splinter-savaged fingers into the rough stone floor.

Don't tell me you can't, because I know you can, he muttered imperturbably.

This conversation triggered memories of another discussion once before, one with Professor Snape as he cupped her wan, bony cheeks in warm, spicy hands and told her in his calm, stentorian baritone, that, yes, she could block out the pain if she chose it. All she had to do was make it so. Then allspice and parchment dust had invaded her nostrils in a pervasive cloud of tangible peace, and doubt had fallen away and taken the hot, ravenous agony with it. In the hour of her unquestioning belief in the man who held her face in his hands, she had found rest, Glory, Glory, by God, Hallelujah.

Drawing on the memory of surprisingly gentle fingers against her cheeks, she pushed against the smothering weight of untamed magic. Parchment and spice and gleaming black eyes; that's what hope is made of. She closed her eyes and willed his smell to be. This was the unchangeable, past, yes, but it was also the Story, and that she could manipulate.

She focused on the lullaby whisper of Neville Longbottom's voice. Perfectly rounded vowels and closed consonants drifted over her ears in beckoning caress. A, B, C, D, E...Steady and sure as the beat of her heart. Her laboring lungs eased, and her heart slowed to match the rhythm of the phantom alphabet. She withdrew into the darkness behind her eyes, and with every measured respiration the alphabet grew louder and the encroaching magic retreated like a bested foe.

In and out, in and out. Her chest expanded in lazy, hypnotic arcs, and as she drew in a last deep breath before opening her eyes, a tantalizing whiff a allspice tickled her nose with teasing fingers. It wasn't the overpowering deluge for which she had hoped, but it was enough, and she sat up and swiped a shaking hand beneath her oozing nostrils. The magic still pressed around her in a greedy, malevolent tide, but the pressure was no longer crippling. She tottered to her feet, swaying drunkenly, and when her equilibrium re-established itself, she shambled toward the door to the classroom. It was time to get out of here.

Her foot froze in mid-step, toe dangling gracelessly above the floor. Her gaze had wandered to the figure of Colin Creevey, who was, like the other imagined occupants of the room, unmoving as a wax mannequin, outstretched palm cupped over the open top of the phial. His face was a grinning, lupine rictus of terrified dismay, his eyes bulging from their sockets, and yet...there was something off-kilter about his expression, an underlying nuance in the corners of his eyes that she could not quite place, though a disturbing familiarity tugged insistently at the base of her brain.

The Messenger, harbinger of calamity. Why had the Story called him that? If anything deserved that epithet, it was the phial of poison in his taloned hand. That had been the catalyst for all the disaster thereafter. Yet the Story had left it nameless, ascribed to it no significance in the grand mosaic of the truth, and instead bestowed the grim onus of calamity upon a bug-eyed, histrionic fourth-year whose only sin was to catch the blighted potion before it hit the ground.

Intrigued, she moved closer, and then, a realization slipped into place with an audible click. Colin had been delivering a parchment from Professor McGonagall when he crashed into the desk, and whatever had been written on it had angered Professor Snape enough to send him into a fit of histrionic, hissing, black-tongued rage. He had, she remembered now, deducted the remaining points from the woefully anemic Gryffindor point glass and rounded on the glowering Potter with euphoric vitriol. Could the parchment crumpled in Creevey's iron-fingered, unyielding fist shed light on the tangled mystery?

She pulled on the corner of parchment that protruded from his stony grip, but it refused to budge. Undaunted, she prised at his tightly coiled fingers, but the flushed digits were cemented against his palm.

"Christ on a cheese cracker," she muttered, and wrenched with all her might. The cold, smooth fist moved not a centimeter. "Damn your Gryffindor bull-headedness," she groused dispiritedly, but there was no anger in it, only weary resignation.

There was nothing more she could do here; the Story had revealed all that it intended to show her, and the pulsating wall of magic around her was gaining strength again, a ravenous panther crouched and ready to spring. The hot eagerness of it wafted over her cheeks and carried with it the crisp, metallic reek of ozone. It was preparing another strike at her hastily constructed defenses, and if it breached the nebulous wall of stale allspice that surrounded her in a protective mantle, she would not drive it back a second time. She made a mental note to ask the Professor about the note the next time she saw him, and started for the door again.

It was a shimmering thread that caught her attention, a gossamer filament that peeked from beneath one of Professor Snape's boots. The end protruding from the front was pink and snaked in an unbroken line from the toe of his boot to the far wall of the classroom, where it disappeared into the damp stone wall. The other end was green and reached from the well-oiled heel into the near wall. She blinked in surprise and swallowed with a dry, glottal click.

His lifeline, she thought with giddy stupefaction. That's never happened before.

You've never mucked about with the rules of Arithmancy, Cryptology, and Runes before, either, pointed out her grandfather prosaically. And I'm not at all sure you should have.

Touche.

Her gaze drifted from one end of the thin line to the other, and a terrible compulsion seized her. She wanted to see what had made him, drink from the deep and secret well that had sustained him for all these years and tinctured his blood with such inveterate bitterness and despair. She could, too. All she had to do was step forward, grasp the strand between her fingers, and let it lead her beyond the wall and into the past. If she were pugnacious enough, she could return to the beginning and gaze upon him as he lay in swaddling clothes. She could find the cipher, the linchpin that had soured sweet ambrosia dreams to rancid wormwood, and those burning black eyes would forsake her dreams.

Not yours, not yours to see, chided her conscience, and it was true. What she was contemplating as she stood in the middle of a time to which she no longer had a right was an abuse of power beyond redemption. It was an invasion, a desecration of mind and soul. It would be a systematic pillage of every memory, truth, and belief that he held dear, a voyeuristic glimpse at the events that had shaped and molded him. Worse still, he would be powerless to stop it, would not even be aware of it. Rape with total impunity.

She was disgusted by this train of thought, and she recoiled from it in nauseated horror, but it would not leave her. It tightened its seductive grip on her, wrapped goading fingers around her flickering moral compass and twisted it from true north. A thousand and one justifications sprouted in the febrile landscape of her mind, beautiful as winter roses, and though she knew rot and blight lurked beneath their lush petals, she longed to touch them anyway.

You could better help him if you but understood what made him tick, the dulcet, Luciferian voice of temptation wheedled. He never has to know, and what he doesn't know will bring him no harm. You can keep a secret; you've done it before, and if, in the end the things you learn help exonerate him, well, then, that's all right, isn't it? The ends justify the means.

You'll know, interjected her grandfather with acerbic vehemence. You'll know. Can you live with the knowledge of what you have done, or will it consume you, a conscience cancer that eats you alive while you look into that bleak face and tell him that you respect him and will protect him if you can? Can you tell that lie? Not to yourself, or to me, but to him? Can you call yourself his savior if you know that you have debased him far more than the Ministry sons of bitches ever could?

Everything he said made perfect sense, and yet she was going to ignore it. She was going to see what lay beyond the closely guarded wards of Professor Snape's fortress, propriety be damned. Curiosity was an agony in her blood, and if she did not propitiate it, it would drive her mad. It would be her secret sin, and if it troubled her, robbed her of easy rest, then that would be her penance.

Self-loathing cramped her stomach, and bile coated her throat. A low moan escaped her, and tears joined the hardening crust of blood and snot on her face. She did not want to betray the fledgling trust he had shown her in his chambers last night, prove herself unworthy of the grudging tolerance that clearly cost him so dear, but try as she might, her feet would not turn from their path, but bore her to the place where glowing green past met cold, damp stone.

She could not look into Professor Snape's eyes as she passed. They were wide and accusatory, and the fact that the real Professor was sequestered in his chambers a castle away brought no consolation. She could not shake the feeling that his soul had taken up residence inside the badly realized effigy and was watching her, testing her character and her mettle with this irresistible temptation.

"Oh, sir," she whimpered, and staggered to the waiting, mocking thread on numb, wooden legs.

It crackled when she bent to touch it, a triumphant, sibilant sizzle that made the white-blonde down on her forearms prickle and the blue-veined flesh pucker into hard knots of angry gooseflesh. She pressed the sharp, thin crescents of her fingernails into her palm in a last-ditch effort to divert herself from this awful course, but not even the bright, salt sting of blood could rouse her from the single-minded reverie that had captured her mind the moment she had lain eyes on the luminous emerald tendril. She was going to do it. And then Neville Longbottom fell silent.

In the chaotic aftermath of her foolhardy decision to play this volatile, pernicious game, she would never have the opportunity to ask him why he stopped, and in truth, she didn't care. The only thing that did matter, then, and in all the years after, was that the sudden absence of his reedy monotone jolted her from her trance, weakened the barrier she had erected between herself and the magic that sought to crush her in its lethal, implacable grip, and magic darted through the momentary breach to nip at her unprotected hip.

She stumbled into the stone wall with a bone-rattling thump, and her teeth clicked together in her mouth with a sound like rolling die.

"Oh, Jesus," she grunted in a thin, hysteria-laced voice. "Oh, Jesus, what was I doing?" Her breath came in hot, ragged gasps, and her mouth tasted of wormwood and rotten flesh. She gagged and swayed, one ear and scalding cheek pressed against the harsh stone.

The sound coming from behind the weeping wall was soft and stealthy, a sound she had heard in a dozen nightmares and one half-remembered daze in the Potions classroom, a chitinous, perverse clittering. Pebbles tumbling over a precipice.

Not pebbles. That's an organic sound. Whatever makes that sound is alive. It occurred to her that once upon a time, she had known the thing responsible for that noise, had caught a glimpse of it on the barest periphery of her mortified vision, but in a rare moment of mercy, her mind would not let her remember, and she found that she was glad. A muffled, bubbling sob escaped her, and she wrenched away from the wall and fell to her knees.

They are coming for him. The cryptic thought terrified her, and she clapped a raw, bloody hand to her mouth to stifle a panicked, mindless wail.

It no longer mattered what lurked behind the walls. They could keep their secrets and their ciphers; all she wanted was to escape this room with her sanity intact. She scrabbled backwards, heedless of where she went or what she touched. Her knees were scoured and bruised, and as the left one drew level with the toe of Professor Snape's boot, it scraped the pink end of the temporal thread, and she saw.

Shutterclick visions, fast and fleeting as fog, but potent enough to drive rational thought from her mind in a single roundhouse slap. Baying wolves with crimson fangs. A smug, sated toad. Professor Snape screaming and writhing beneath the steady, gleaming wand of a blue-robed Auror. Pain that boiled blood, shattered bones, and ground minds to dust. The jungly reek of urine and lips colder than January frost.

She saw it all in the instant before she jerked her knee from the thread of probability, and unlike the amorphous shape of the monstrosity that infested these walls, she remembered them all in stark, vivid detail. She threw back her head and shrieked, a lunatic aria of blind terror, and scrambled to her feet. The door was her only hope, and through the haze of tears, it was a thousand feet and a century away.

"NEVILLE! Don't stop!" she howled. The shield of allspice and parchment dust was fading, and if she didn't reach the door in thirty seconds, she never would.

As if he had heard her, Neville's voice rang out in the eerie stillness, quiet but clear as the clarion of cavalry trumpets. She gave a miserable, throttled sob and ran for the door, the vengeful, ravenous magic of the Story at her heels. It had never forgiven her for escaping it once before, escaping and imprisoning it in a dark, sepulchral basement with salted ground, and it meant to have her. It reached for the back of her robes with impatient, glassy fingers, and she hissed as it scorched tender flesh. Her knees pistoned to the center of her chest, and twin tongs of exhaustion and exertion embedded themselves into her side and throbbed like an infected wound, and still the blessed door drew no nearer. It was a mirage, forever beyond her reach.

Push and jump, screamed the frantic voice of self-preservation inside her head. Push and jump, or you're going to die.

"Professor Snape, Professor Snape ProfessorProfessorProfessor," she wheezed as she gathered her legs beneath her for an impossible leap. Please, Professor. I need your help. When his face had crystallized in her mind, all oil drop eyes and sallow, ivory cheeks, she anchored every fragile hope to it and leaped.

For Neville Longbottom, watching Rebecca Stanhope weave the threads of the Story had been the most bizarre and terrifying of his life, and he wished with all his might that he had never agreed to help her. If he hadn't, someone more equipped to deal with the unpleasant realization that sanity and order had departed these shores, abdicated in favor of utter madness, would be here now. Instead, he was standing upon the sacrificial remains of untold mice and reciting the bloody alphabet while his mangled Housemate wrangled with demons he could not see.

He wished she would stop, wished she would let him stop, but she continued to scream and flail in her chair, the quill fisted in her clenching fingers slashing across the parchment in wild, wavering arcs and misting the walls with ink like blood spatter. She was weeping and muttering in a glottal, wet whisper that made his flesh crawl. It was the sound of lungs clogged with pleurisy, and he shuddered.

Her head swiveled in his direction with the twanging creak of tendon, and the spittle dried in his mouth. Her eyes were blank as whitewashed windows, and tears, blood and snot crusted beneath her nose and on the defiant jut of her chin.

"Rebecca?" he said, and took a tentative step forward.

Her hand seized the parchment on her lap and thrust it at him. "Take," she commanded in that dead, rotten seaweed voice.

He did not want to take it, did not want to see what was written there. Whatever had come from this dark and terrible journey was blighted with its avaricious corruption, and he was afraid that if he touched it, it would taint him as well.

"Take," she ordered again, and this time, he saw a flicker of the Rebecca he had come to know behind those curtained eyes. She thrust the parchment at him.

He took it gingerly and held it between thumb and forefinger with an involuntary moue of revulsion. The paper felt diseased, slimy, and bile rose in his throat.

"Dumbledore. No one else. Not the Aurors. No matter what." She spoke in a disconnected, dreamy monotone, as though each syllable carried a wrenching price. Her eyes rolled in their sockets.

"Are you all right?" he asked, knowing even as he spoke that it was an asinine question. She was several thousand miles from all right.

"No," she grunted. She jabbed her finger at the parchment. "Pocket."

He stuffed the wrinkled parchment into his robes with a relieved grimace. "What did you see?"

She cackled. "Dresden is burning," she said matter-of-factly, and then she pitched forward in a dead faint.