Summon the Lambs to Slaughter

Chapter Forty-Nine

While his gnarled little sibyl waltzed with his old nemesis and reluctant ally, Alastor Moody, Severus Snape found himself in a position that was becoming all too familiar. He sat on his sofa, slender, tapered hands folded between his knees, and stared at...nothing. He had had neither time nor use for such aesthetic fripperies as art, and he had wasted not one Galleon on the haughty acquisition of paintings to decorate his walls. As such, they were devoid of any distraction for eye or mind save the faint outlines of mildew against the stone.

He shifted on the sofa and leaned forward to inspect a particularly intricate pattern near the top right corner, an undulating whorl that somehow reminded him of a tentacle. It seemed to reach toward the junction of wall and ceiling in mute supplication, striving for a summit it would never reach. The straining tip stopped three inches from its goal, and in his mind's eye, he imagined the subterranean behemoth to which it belonged, an Elder God trapped forever beneath a sea of stone and winter damp, shorn of its might by those who dared call themselves his better and damned to tread the same stagnant water until the very fabric of the cosmos moldered to nothing.

Well could he understand its frustration. The week of his confinement had frayed his usually indomitable nerves to the breaking point. His palms were raw from constant rubbing together, and his lips were chapped from constant licking. The taste of blood was ever on his tongue, hot and coppery and salty, and beneath the bitter tang was the agonizing sweetness of old and forbidden memories.

He had tried so very hard to suppress them, his old and secret sins and illicit pleasures, and with the demands of teaching, supervising first-years through their first cack-handed practicals, feigning interest in Quidditch, and the dangerous game of espionage, he had all but succeeded. Oh, there had been brief lapses in the middle of the night, when he had awakened to find himself hard beneath his tatty, spartan nightclothes, hips rocking to a primal rhythm against the narrow mattress of his bachelor's bed. He could not deny that. Any more than he could deny that he embraced them when they came, lost himself to the opiate haze of his memories as he rutted against the bedclothes and savored the heady recollection of delicious friction stolen from between struggling thighs.

He was always ashamed afterward, when the endorphin rush of release had passed and the triumphant heat of his seed had cooled to unpleasant stickiness on his belly. That his vile deeds should creep up on him while he was at his most vulnerable enraged him; that he drew pleasure from them sickened him. His only consolation was that he had never acted upon the base urges these nocturnal reveries provoked. Those were slaked by a visit to Knockturn Alley and the procurement of a desperate whore who did not mind a Death Eater's hands upon her sagging breasts, and who would studiously ignore the Mark seared into his left forearm for a few Galleons more. He had learned to cope.

But if idle hands were the Devil's workshop, then so, too, was an idle mind, because with nothing to distract him, he found himself returning to the days of his darkness, resurrecting ghosts he had counted buried long ago. Faces he had forgotten suddenly regained painful acuity, and his ears rang with sounds he had banished-the sibilant purr of tearing fabric, the damp slap of conjoined flesh, muffled sobs, the somnolent, furtive drip of blood on a hearth rug. And in his mouth the taste of gall and vindication.

His mouth puckered in a moue of disgust, and his right hand strayed unconsciously to massage his left forearm. His fingers found the rough groove of eyeless sockets and began to trace in delicate circles. On the wall, the undulating tentacle of the deposed Elder God waved at him.

"This is ludicrous," he snarled to the empty room, but he continued to knead his hidden brand in slow, hypnotic circles, and when his pursed lips cracked and bled, his tongue darted out to catch the crimson droplets that beaded on his lower lip, and filled his mouth with that sultry tang.

Blood had been the catalyst for both his fall and his bid for redemption. The very foundations of the world were built upon it. It was the substance of life, more precious than gold, more vital than water. A man could survive three days without water, but he could not draw one breath more without the blood in his veins. One beast drew sustenance from the lifeblood of another, and men killed each other by the thousands in the name of purification.

In that, at least, wizards and Muggles have something in common, he thought wryly, and his ragged lips twisted into a bitter smile.

So much so that it was rumored Grindewald had allied himself with Muggle despot, Adolf Hitler, in an attempt to consolidate power on the Muggle and wizarding fronts. Whether there was any truth to it was debatable, but it had been the hot topic of discussion for the young Purebloods of his day. Indeed, on Hogsmeade weekends, they had gathered around the pocked and wobbling tables of the Three Broomsticks and ruminated upon the matter with the earnestness of young men burdened with too much money and too little sense. Armchair generals fought wars and achieved world domination while sipping butterbeers or hot apple cider and trying to cop a surreptitious feel on any female in the vicinity.

But you never sat at the table, did you? Your blood was pure, but your purse strings were tattered. The father's opulence wasn't passed to the son, and with your worn robes and greasy hair, you were hardly the image of Pureblood savoir faire they were trying to cultivate. You were the unfortunate Pureblood, and so you were never invited to draw up a chair and rub elbows with your peers. You sat in the shadows, gangly and awkward as you perched in your uncomfortable chair, a hanger-on tolerated only to preserve the face of House solidarity. You slouched and listened to their grandiose plans and speculations, and you laughed at them from behind clenched teeth, because you knew they were fools. If they had only asked you, you could have told them, could have exposed their logical fallacies and proposed surer ways to victory, but they never asked, and you never volunteered. They underestimated you, and every one of them paid for it in the end.

A flicker of amusement. They had, at that. The merry band of coddled princelings had been no better than James Potter and his coterie as far as he was concerned, and he had taken immense satisfaction in watching them fall. One by one, the pride that had closed their eyes to his cunning and patient intelligence had brought them to a messy end, and when all was said and done, it had been knobbly-kneed Severus Snape that stood in the Dark Lord's favor.

There was Hephaestus Millwood, heir apparent to Lucius Malfoy's role as leader of the House. Brash and loud and wholly devoid of common sense, he espoused his views with reckless glee and made no secret of his plans to join the Movement. Just after his seventeenth birthday, Hephaestus had returned to the Slytherin Common Room, bragging of his initiation and still reeking of burnt flesh and stale sweat, and all the others had gathered around as he pulled back the sleeve of his robes to reveal the livid, red brand. How proud he had been, and Severus could vividly remember being twelve years old and so anxious to get a glimpse of the fabled Mark that he had knocked aside first-year Evan Rosier and relieved him of a front tooth. He had paid for his uncharacteristic chutzpah the following morning, when Evan's older brother, a Slytherin sixth-year, had thoughtfully and thoroughly returned the favor.

Millwood had not been so proud six years later, when a disdainfully bored Lucius Malfoy had slit his throat with a turn of his wrist. In fact, he had been groveling for his life before an impassive Dark Lord who did not forgive failure, and when his blood had spattered on the white silk of Severus' mask in a fine red mist, Severus had only smiled and dipped the toes of his boots into the warm, red puddle as he filed from the room with the rest of the Death Eater elite. To the victor went the spoils.

He had been the first, but he had not been the last. There was Ptolemy Cromwell, Millwood's crony, killed by Aurors during a botched raid the year after Severus joined the ranks. His body had been left for the crows and the sniggering Aurors. Only the truly favored were carried home by their comrades.

There was Domitius Figliari, throttled by his own tongue for speaking too freely of the Movement's plans, and Tobias Johanssen, captured by Aurors and tortured to insanity three months before he, Severus, came to himself with the sour gall of blood in his mouth and coating his teeth and fingers in a brilliant splash of crimson. Evan Rosier's brother, he of the complimentary rearrangement of Severus' teeth, committed suicide in Azkaban three years after the Dark Lord's first defeat at the hands of St. Potter the Second, and four years into his indentured servitude to Albus Dumbledore, he had done a lively, viciously triumphant jig behind the locked door off his office. Ashes, ashes, they all fell down.

They were all gone, moldering in their tombs, and here he sat, entombed within the walls of his chambers and pinning his fate on a mangled Gryffindor chit's ability to lie. It was galling, infuriating, and yet, he could not help but be amused. The dirty, greasy boy who had once privately derided the idea of a Dark Wizard stooping so low as to enlist the aid of a mad Muggle demagogue had been reduced to silent cheerleader to a child he would have throttled without a backward glance. Fortuna's wheel was capricious, indeed.

To be fair, she was hardly the beginning of his disillusionment. That had begun the moment the snake and skull had been branded into his flesh. The purposeful, disciplined group he had expected had turned out to be little more than a ragtag band of spoiled Pureblood elites and raving madmen seeking outlets for their gross deviance. There had been exceptions, of course, like-minded, intelligent individuals who truly believed in a wizarding society devoid of Mudblood rabble-Lucius, Narcissa and her fanatical and beautiful sister, Bellatrix, and her silent, heavy-browed paramour, Rudolphus Lestrange-but they were few and far between and the purest-blooded of them all. The others had been parasitic hangers-on, more interested in stout than revolution.

Like your father.

He stiffened. He hadn't thought consciously of his father since the day the bastard had done the world a favor and suffered a brain hemorrhage over his morning porridge. Like the days of bloodletting, those memories had been relegated to the deepest, most isolated recesses of his mind, and they were given rein only in his uneasiest dreams. Now, those doors, too, had been thrown open, and with neither wand nor whiskey to drive them back, he had no choice but to endure them. He had Fudge and the Ministry to thank for that.

"Bloody bastards," he hissed, and rubbed his raw hands together, sand on parchment. He winced.

That was where the real disillusionment began. Not in that barren, windswept clearing, with the wind clutching your robes with icy, bloodless fingers and the bright, feverish, orange eye of the branding iron leering out of the darkness, but in a sprawling, Tudor plunging inexorably into genteel decay. Your education as to the harsh reality of the world was found in the yellowing, peeling wallpaper in the drawing room and in your mother's face.

When you were little, her face frightened you because it reminded you of that wallpaper, lined and ravaged and gradually sinking in upon itself beneath the weight of despair. It was so old; it wasn't a Mummy face at all. It was the face of disappointment and barely concealed terror. You used to pat it, try and smooth the grooves and lines away with your little-boy fingers, but no matter how hard you tried, they just grew deeper. By the time you were of age and ready to kick the dust of that house from your heels for the last time, she was a haggard and drawn husk with sagging cheeks and drooping breasts. Life beneath your father's iron heel had drained her of all vitality. Even the black eyes she passed to you were dead as cold cinders, and though you felt a traitor's guilt when you left her there with him, you were glad, too, because you couldn't bear to look at her anymore.

His scoured hands clutched his knees so tightly that the delicate flesh broke, and blood beaded on his palms and stippled the fabric of his robes. His knuckles were white, and he wondered for a moment if the bones had broken through the tender skin.

You wonder how many of those lines on her face came from your hand. You were a child of twilight, born to her when most women have long since put dreams of motherhood aside. My little miracle, she called you, and she would put her cool hand on your forehead and brush your fringe from your face. But she never did it in your father's hearing, and you suspect your very existence earned her a stripe or two. You were not supposed to be, and your mother's miracle was your father's curse.

He never raised a hand to you. That was reserved for your mother. He might not have wanted you, might have cursed your name and begrudged every Knut put to your care, but half of your flesh belonged to him, and vanity would not let him bruise it. He found other ways to visit his vengeance upon you. His lessons never marked your skin, but they cut more deeply than any physical blow.

He taught you early that love was weakness. He knew you loved her, and he used it against you. If he was successful in nothing else in his wretched, misbegotten life, he was a master manipulator. If you disobeyed, he threatened her, and if boyish truculence stiffened your neck, he broke hers. Not literally, of course, but her anguished cries and the crack of flesh on flesh carried through the house, and with each cry, the years were stripped away, until you were four years old again and crouching in the wardrobe with snot and scalding tears streaming down your face.

That was your first taste of the fundamental paradox. Your father spoke at length, when he spoke at all, about the superiority of blood. That was your lullaby, your bedtime story. You crouched at his feet like a feral cub, bare feet dancing on the cold stone floor, and listened to him sermonize. You never got any closer. He might have been your father, but touch was forbidden, and even if it weren't, he always smelled faintly of sweat and blood, as if he had splashed it on as part of his morning toilet. So you crouched, knees bent and toes flexed, and listened. Ambition and intelligence were hardly mutually exclusive, after all.

He told you about your heritage and your responsibilities. A thousand years of history fell from his lips in a hypnotic singsong, a tale of Norman Snapes, Celtic Snapes, proper Saxon Snapes, and Briton Snapes. The Snape name was old as antiquity, and proud. Snapes were men of power and eminence, bred to be leaders of men and not to be ruled by heart's passion. Snapes ruled wheresoever they trod, and they commanded respect. Solemn and wide-eyed, you took it all in, this impossible legacy, and you were proud.

Yet, even as he bestowed the mantle upon you, it was already crumbling. The family fortune was dwindling, thanks to your father's arrogance and predilection for the cards and his insatiable appetite for women. The familial land holdings were sold to pay gambling debts and feed the innumerable bastards he sired with bar wenches and Mudblood prostitutes, and your inheritance was gone long before your father died.

By the time you were thirteen, your father could no longer afford to maintain the pretense of respectable gentility and care for you, and so you were left to your own devices, sequestered in your damp, moldering room and slaughtering unwary flies while your unwashed skin itched and chafed beneath threadbare cotton underwear. The boys at Hogwarts laughed at you behind their cupped hands and freshly scrubbed faces and wrinkled their noses when you drew near. You were skinny and concave-chested, and when you stood before the looking glass, you searched desperately for the Pureblood avatar that lived beneath your skin, but try as you might, you could never draw him out.

By fifteen and the year of your drubbing at the hands of Potter and his friends by the lake, the notion of Pureblood fraternity had been thoroughly disabused, as had your father's lingering hope of prominence. Your Pureblood fellows stood idly by and watched while the truth was revealed in an unbecoming flash of drab, tatty grey wool, and some of them even laughed while that was stripped away to reveal the whole sorry truth stamped into your bony hips and your black-thatched sex. And while you dangled upside down with your flaccid, mortified cock pointed south, your father swallowed gin, touted his fading superiority and exorcised his demons with each fist that struck your mother's pathetic, battered face.

You were well-versed in hypocrisy and disappointment by the time Lucius Malfoy and Lord Voldemort drew you into their fold. That's why you accepted their outstretched hands so readily; you were looking for something better, for that fabled place where you could walk as the lord you were meant to be, where everyone saw your worth and trembled. There would be no tatty underwear, no fraying hems and clothes that smelled of sour sweat, just perfumed silk and adulation. You only wanted what your name had promised.

But when fire and burnt flesh had burned away all impurities and fanciful notions, all you found was more of the same. Empty arrogance and false entitlement. James Potters in Slytherin skins and brocade robes, more interested in debauchery than advancement of the Pureblood cause. More than once, a Death Eater raid was bollixed because the cream of Pureblood masculinity couldn't resist defiling himself with a Mudblood whore or "re-educating" a wayward Pureblood witch. They took what they could and left behind nothing but scorched earth and anguish, and even after all was said and done, you never got an equal share of the spoils. There was always a little less for you. It was always a little smaller or a bit shabbier, and the few times you protested, they chastised you for your greed while stuffing their own pockets with plunder. Even in the Promised Land, you were not good enough.

Lord Voldemort was the biggest disappointment of all. Oh, there was no denying his power. He was the Serpent of serpents, dripping malevolence like musk and possessed of a charisma that mesmerized you even as it hardened you beneath your robes. That he was the heir of Slytherin was beyond doubt, but for all that, you found him lacking. Beneath his seductive rhetoric and bombast was the same selfishness and avarice displayed by your contemporaries. His loyalty was not to the Pureblood cause, but to himself. Yes, he would exterminate the Mudbloods and eventually the bothersome Muggles, but when the battle was over and the fields were awash in blood, there would be no redistribution of the hard-earned riches. Just Lord Voldemort standing astride the world and ruling it with an iron fist.

And still you stayed, because you could not bear to admit your mistake, to concede that you didn't know everything, and it was better than being alone. Even if the promises were hollow, you could still count yourself among their number, find fraternity where none existed. For the first time in your life, you had purpose, a place to call your own, and you would not surrender that which you had bought with the flesh of your forearm.

Besides, there were some who did believe. Lucius Malfoy was as arrogant as the rest, but he was a devout supporter of Pureblood dominance. He paid more than lip service to the cause. He gave Galleons and blood for it, and as much as you despise him, you respect him for that. He was smart enough, Slytherin enough to escape Azkaban, which was more than you could say for the others. Rookwood, Dolohov, the Lestranges-for all their ardor, they were stupid and reckless enough to be caught, even if they were carted off to their cells with oaths of undying loyalty to Voldemort on their lips. They believed, and so did you, and for a while, that was enough.

Until the night you found yourself on all fours in some ravaged home, your mouth filled with blood and your hands slick and warm with a Pureblood witch's life. There you sat, trousers bunched around your thighs, straddling a woman as Pure and noble as you, listening to the sounds of Rookwood pilfering their flat and Lucius patiently breaking the bones of her four-year-old son. The spell broke with the snapping of his neck, and as you stared into the ragged hole where her throat had been and counted your teeth marks, you had an epiphany.

You were not a deposed princeling reclaiming the fortune wrested from you by unkind circumstance and your father's penchant for whoring, nor were you a righteous crusader protecting your kind from the worthless and dangerously uneducated. You were a minion, a nineteen-year-old dray horse sent to dirty your hands so that he wouldn't have to. You were killing the very people you had sworn to exalt. You were a pawn, and when he was through with you, you would be just as dead as the woman beneath you. So you did what Slytherins do best. You found a way out. You left one devil to embrace another, because you'd be damned if you would serve on bended knee.

He snorted at the irony of that last. His wounded pride had balked at the prospect of eternal servitude, and yet he had sought sanctuary beneath the auspices of the hardest taskmaster of them all. Albus neither tortured nor threatened his supplicants, but his control was just as absolute as that of the Dark Lord he had fled. He achieved his ends with kindness and implacable serenity, and the knife he wielded cut more deeply than any curse Lord Voldemort had ever cast, because it was acquiescence born of obligation and terrible guilt. He could no more refuse Albus than he could ignore the call of the Dark Mark when it came. Too much had been bartered away on his behalf. He resented the burden the Headmaster's salvation had foisted upon him, but he could not bear to see disappointment in those wise blue eyes. He was caught in a catch-22 of his own making.

He wondered what they would think of him now, his old friends who were rotting away in Azkaban, sloughing years like old skin and watching sanity slip through their fingers like dust. His rational mind doubted they thought of him at all. They were too consumed by the darkness and the damp and the sussurating flutter of a Dementor's robes. Bellatrix, whose sanity was already deteriorating when the Aurors led her away, had likely progressed to devouring the rats and spiders unwise enough to venture into her cell, Renfield's daughter with the long black hair. He knew all of this, but the shred of imagination he allowed himself fancied that they might ponder him from time to time when all the old grudges had been put aside and there was nothing else to fill the hours. Did they envy him his freedom, or did they admire his cunning?

Not that there was much to inspire jealousy anymore. The liberty for which he had paid so dearly was gone, and he was just as caged. There were no rats and no slinking Dementors, but Fudge and the Aurors would suffice until justice washed over him in a black caul of ice and despair. His shifting allegiance had gained him nothing.

It gave you a second chance, whispered the niggling voice of hope that would not be quashed, and he cursed Albus Dumbledore's nauseating optimism with every fiber of his being.

What good had it done? He had added to nothing but his years, and his legacy remained the same. Once, he had wanted to rule the world; now he only wished to be remembered by it. He didn't care how. The respect for which he had so hungered had never come, and when he failed to inspire it in even the most puling of his pupils, he had settled for fear. Fear the little bastards understood. Now even that was gone, stripped away the moment the Headmaster had removed his Head of House pin.

His fingers drifted to the collar of his robes. Nothing but two pinprick holes where it should be. His hand fell to his lap.

Here you sit, a heartbeat away from a Dementor's Kiss and an unmarked grave, and all you can think about are your past sins and the friends you never had. Shouldn't you be thinking of Potter the Younger and how to escape inevitable consequence one last time? Because your quixotic chit is not going to save you, no matter what Dumbledore thinks.

He was thinking of Potter, oddly enough. Just not that one. He could no more avoid contemplating the apple of House Gryffindor and all its generations than he could stay his acerbic tongue from lashing out at insufferable idiocy. The Potters were the bookends to his life. The father had driven him to the darkness, and now the son would carry him to the gallows. He would not be at all surprised to find Potterian threads in his burial shroud.

His thoughts turned to Harry Potter and that fateful day in Potions. He could see it all so clearly, feel it with total sensory recall. The milky, badly botched Advanced Sleeping Draught crawling from one side of the phial to the other as he tilted it to and fro in the wan torchlight. The flickering smirk that had darted across his thin lips like the twitching of a cat's tail. The hushed silence that only uneasy expectation brings. Potter's truculent, defiant face as he trudged to the front of the room. And then that terrible, lolling weight as comeuppance had gone awry.

Sweat. He smelled like sweat and laundry soap, he thought suddenly and for no reason at all. Like healthy boy. Or a small child.

He rose from the couch in a single swift motion, knees popping like dried bones tossed upon a fire, and began to pace. His muscles were stiff from long hours of confinement and the needling cold that seeped through the castle walls and settled into his bones. The numbing chill was usually kept at bay by the torches and the fire, but most of the former had gone out for want of a daily Incendio, and the fireplace had last been used on the night of the Headmaster's ridiculous jig. He could light neither without his wand, and Fudge had confiscated that.

He stamped his feet to force blood flow and the return of sensation and clasped his hands behind his back. He had been over Potter's collapse from every fathomable perspective, and the answer to the mystery eluded him. The cyanide should not have been there, and it should certainly not have come from his own damn stores, but the missing grams and the presence of the poison in the phial stood in stark contradiction to his truth.

He had pondered a thousand scenarios, each more improbable than the next, and dismissed them, only to return to them and turn them over in his mind, the tendrils of his consciousness curling over them in a desperate lover's caress. He searched for any flaws in his logic, any small clue he had overlooked. He had even wondered if he hadn't transferred the cyanide without realizing it. But no. He had washed his hands thoroughly before handling the phial, a compulsive habit that had served him well, and even if he hadn't, the blasted draught had been stoppered and sealed until Potter drank it.

"It was sealed," he snarled, and fought the impulse to knead his temples. A headache was forming behind his eyes, and there was no Anti-Ache to quell it.

How, then? For all its wonders, the magical world was still subject to certain incontrovertible laws. There was no miraculous osmosis to explain the contamination. The glass of his storage phials was non-porous to prevent dangerous commingling, and they were subjected to a rigorous inspection, not only at their place of manufacture, but upon receipt at the school. Any defective phials were immediately discarded. He took no chances.

Which meant that either the potion had been poisoned before it was stoppered and given to him, or it was exposed to the contaminant when it was opened. Neither option was plausible. Potter was a sullen, mollycoddled brat, but as a student, he was indifferent and sloppy, not stupid. His friends were unlikely candidates for sabotage. Weasley was an unsalvageable twit, but he lacked the subtlety and finesse for such a feat, and Hermione Granger, swot and future spinster, would never have attempted it. Poisoning was no doubt an affront to her Gryffindor sensibilities, and what was more, had she been the perpetrator, she would not have failed. She was nothing if not thorough.

That left exposure to airborne contaminant as the other possible reason, but that, too, collapsed under close scrutiny. Airborne cyanide was deadly, and when last he checked, it was hardly selective in whom it struck. If it were loose in the air, it would have adversely affected all occupants of the room, not just Potter, and aside from Stanhope's erratic twitching, no one had demonstrated any ill effects. They had left his classroom as they had entered it, shaken but upright.

Maybe he did it on purpose.

It always came back to that in the end, that tantalizing lure of the endgame. Gryffindors were hardly known for their subtlety, and Potters least of all. He had no doubt that in the deepest, most closely guarded pit of his vacuous little mind, Potter had imagined this, his vengeance and his escape from an obligation he did not want. Death and liberation, and while dewy-eyed mourners sifted damp, graveyard earth between their fingers in silent farewell, the greasy bastard he had so despised would rock and croon in some forgotten cell, bereft of consciousness and memory, and from his lofty perch in the heavens, the boy would look down and laugh at his fallen foe.

It was delicious, and he wanted to believe it. He had so long played the role of the downtrodden victim and the sputtering fool in the courts of Kings Voldemort and Dumbledore that he had acquired a taste for it, mud and ridicule and degradation, and if he was to endure this, it would give him no greater pleasure than to shout in the old man's face, point a long, accusatory finger and cry, "See! See what your cosseted little champion has done?" as they dragged him away. The very thought sent a shiver of gleeful anticipation down his spine and the taste of honey into his mouth. Ha Satan at the last.

A delicious, longing fantasy was all it would ever be, however, and he knew it. Potter was bitter and brash and brimming with resentment for his lot and hatred for all things Slytherin, but his ego demanded of him a better death than wasting to skin and bones beneath an infirmary bedsheet, demanded a swan song to match his illustrious and revered father's demise. No Potter ever died on his knees, and he was prepared to wager every last Galleon is his meager Gringotts account that Harry had no intention of being the first. Like as not, if the wretch survived this, he would die with his teeth buried in the Dark Lord's throat, his wand clutched in lifeless, stiffening fingers. He would die a hero's death.

He snorted and watched the breath fog the air in front of him. Wasn't that what he had dreamt of as a boy, to live as a lord or to die the death of the valorous, wand aloft and teeth bared in eternal defiance? All rot. There was no good death, no nobility in the final breath. Death was cruel and ugly, and it had no care with either saint or sinner, the aged or the child. Villain or hero, they all died in their own filth.

All his theories spent, he returned to the beginning, fingers moving deftly through the tangled threads of the problem with the deft familiarity of long acquaintance. He found the tattered edges of discarded possibility and the nub of a memory he could not quite recall. Merlin knew he had tried. He had spent hours coaxing his stubborn mind to surrender it, but he had trained it well, and it would not relent. The memory remained just beyond his grasp, blurry and indistinct.

It had come to him once, in the throes of a nightmare from which he had awakened sweating and chilled, a scream trapped behind his lips. The warded cabinet had loomed before his bulging eyes, and a flare of pain, ravenous and hot, engulfed his legs. Everything had clicked into place then, but by the time he had scrambled from the bed in search of parchment and quill and shaken the slumber from his bones, the epiphanic surety had faded into sloe-eyed consternation, and he had stood in the frozen darkness of his bedroom, blinking and groping stupidly, until he had conceded defeat and crawled beneath the covers again to seek a sleep that would not come.

All for want of a quill, he thought savagely, and was seized with the urge to throw something. Anything, so long as he could have the satisfaction of watching it splinter against the wall.

There was nothing, of course. The Aurors had seized everything that could have been construed as a weapon or an implement of suicide. All that remained to him were time and boot polish and the dust raised by his footfalls as he paced to and fro, and of the three, the latter was dispatched thrice a week by the industrious little house elf who brought his meals and tidied what little clutter he had. He considered lobbing one of the worn throw pillows that slouched disconsolately on the sofa, but decided against it. There would be no twisted wreckage, no visible record of his rage. Just a sibilant huff as cloth struck stone. The gesture of a beaten, impotent man.

The anger came, a white-hot coal lodged in his chest, and he welcomed it. It was better than the helplessness and the stupefying despair, the crippling ennui that cemented him to his bed long after the sun had reached its watery winter zenith. It was bracing, this sick fury, and feverish warmth crept into his fingertips. He flexed them, fingers furling and unfurling like the petals of a poisonous lily. Open. Close. The raw flesh of his palms stung, but he was glad. Pain meant that hope was not yet dead, that vengeance could still be his. A bloodless smirk twitched in the corners of his mouth. Sooner or later, it would be.

There would be a reckoning to the last man. The meticulous accounting of grievances had been a gift from both his father and Lucius Malfoy, and as he stood with the blood surging through his hands, the list of debtors paraded through his mind in a ragtag menagerie-Fudge, with his punctilious, porcine face and ludicrous bowler hat, smug and foolishly unwary, and the Aurors, toadying and incompetent all; Lucius, for breaking for good and all his fragile belief in camaraderie, and Potter, for being weak enough to fall in the first place.

And Stanhope, of course. His changeling child was not exempt from the consequences of failure. Indeed, he held her to the most exacting standard of all. If she fell short and he was led from Hogwarts in manacles, the choicest curses and direst poxes would be reserved for her. Her protestations of good intention would not avail her. He would flay her with his serrated tongue, leave her battered and shivering in his wake. She had dared give him hope, and if she could not secure his deliverance, there would be no pardon.

And what of Dumbledore? Where is he on your list of penitents?

A thin, humorless smile. The puppet master had no place. His immunity from retribution had been guaranteed the instant he sacrificed a precious life debt to the futile cause that was Severus Snape. For him, there would be no vitriol, no black-biled condemnation, only an inclination of his head and a twisted, forlorn smile. And so we come to the end, as we both knew we would someday. The fault is mine. Your only mistake was to have faith in the faithless.

Merlin, groaned the sardonic voice inside his head, stop spouting such maudlin, positively Gryffindorian poetry. One can only tolerate so much sop.

That earned a guttural bark of amusement. His sense of humor had not deserted him entirely, then.

The door to his chambers opened, and he tensed. His hand groped for a wand that wasn't there, and his teeth ground in frustration. Damn Fudge for leaving him so naked. But that was the point, wasn't it? He growled deep in his throat and whirled to face the interloper. If it were Fudge and his slack-jawed cronies, come to jab and hoot at their caged Death Eater, he had no intention of submitting to further indignities. They could paw him after they had wiped the blood from his whitened knuckles. His hands curled into fists.

But the face that peered anxiously around the door belonged to the timorous house elf that brought his meals. Avid, solicitous eyes blinked at him from behind oak and dark varnish, and leathery fingers curled around the door, the stealthy creep of wisteria over an untended trellis.

"Is the Professor Snape well today?" came the shy query, and the elf's ears twitched, twin antennae testing the atmosphere of the room.

The simpering tone irritated him, and his lips drew away from his teeth in a disgusted sneer. "My well-being is of no concern to you. Now stop scraping and trembling and go about your work. And close the door. I'll not tolerate a draught."

He turned from the door and surrendered to the urge to knead his temples. The migraine was a hot, throbbing spike at the base of his skull and the hollows of his cheek. Soon, it would be a rhythmic hammerblow behind his eyes, and his vision would be obscured by starbursts of color that expanded with every heartbeat. By tea, he would be all but blind, and the slightest sound would send jagged glass into his brain. By supper, he would be coiled between the bathtub and the loo, paying obeisance to the chamberpot god and pressing his feverish brow to the sympathetic porcelain while the roiling nausea turned him inside out.

"Damn Fudge," he muttered, and winced at the sizzling flare of pain in his head.

The elf quailed and scuttled into the room, a tray balanced on one palm. "Bitty is sorry, Professor, sir," it squeaked. "I is not meaning to disturb you. I is bringing your food." The elf-he was reasonably certain it was a she-curtseyed, and the pitcher atop the tray yawed precariously.

"Have a care, you impertinent little dolt," he snapped.

Bitty flinched and righted herself with a whimper, and the pitcher listed decidedly aft and narrowly missed overturning into his plate of roast chicken and corn. "Forgive Bitty, Master Snape. She is only trying to help."

He snorted. The china plate was preternaturally bright, and he squinted against the darning needle shafts of light that pierced his eyes. The food was diseased, brown and greasy and reeking of spices. The chicken skin looked like tarnished copper, and his stomach lurched. The cold, metallic tang of the silverware struck his nose, and he belched, sour bile and gastric juices, and he closed his eyes against a wave of nausea.

"Take it away," he ordered. "It's inedible slop."

Bitty gazed at him in bug-eyed incredulity. "Bitty is begging your pardon, sir, but this is not slop." Tiny shoulders stiffened in wounded indignation. "Bitty is cooking this herself. All the students is eating her food, and they is enjoying it."

"As it is a choice between starvation and sustenance of dubious origin, I would hardly construe the students' consumption of your 'food' an endorsement." Sharp, peevish. Merlin, but the smell of the grease and the brightness of the plate were overwhelming. The nausea was a dull cramp in his gut.

"Bitty is leaving it here, sir," she said resolutely. "You is needing to eat." She placed the tray on a nearby chair.

The fraying cord of his temper snapped with an almost audible twang, and a diffuse, red haze clouded his vision. The migraine blossomed inside his skull, the hot throb of an exploded tumor, and the taste of metal shavings filled his mouth. He had endured many humiliations in his quest for redemption-groveling for the charity of a Gryffindor teetering on the precipice of dotage, the sneers and whispers of ungrateful children unworthy of the sweat from his soles, this farcical imprisonment, the loss of his hard-won station-but his pride was not yet so dead that he would be dictated to by a grubby, audacious house elf.

He seized the tray and hurled it at the wall, and the bones of his elbow creaked in mild protest. The tray clattered to the floor, unharmed, but its contents were not as fortunate. The pitcher disintegrated in a shower of milk and ceramic powder, and he instinctively shielded his eyes from the debris with an outstretched palm. The plate, too, shattered with an anguish screech, and the chicken breast slid down the wall, leaving grease in its wake like viscera. The corn peppered the room, fibrous shrapnel, and he slapped disdainfully at a kernel lodged in his sleeve. More kernels clung to the ceiling and the toes of his boots.

"Now," he seethed, queasy, but filled with a satisfaction that bordered on erotic, "have I made myself clear?"

Bitty made no answer. Her eyes were fixed on the bits of crockery puddled at the end of the grease smear, and her trembling hands tugged on the ends of her ears. She swayed on her feet, and for a moment, he was sure she was going to crumple to the floor in a dead faint, but she kept her feet in defiance of gravity.

"Well, have I?" he purred.

Bitty moaned, a low, tremulous sob, and her eyes rolled in their sockets until they fixed on him, wide and bright with swooning terror, a sparrow caught in the strangling coils of a serpent. He had seen that look times uncounted on the faces of his hapless victims, paralytic fear and boneless capitulation. Recognition of his power. Victory. Beneath the blinding pulse of the migraine, shame warred with fleeting, perverse glee.

He crouched, ignoring the creak of his knees, and tilted the cowering elf's chin. "Well?" His breath misted on the tip of her mottled, brown nose. He was close to the remnants of his lunch, and the rich, meaty smell tickled his gorge again. He swallowed the rising bile with a Herculean effort.

Bitty recoiled from the caress of his fingertips. "I is understanding," she shrieked, and staggered away. She tripped over the hem of her Hogwarts toga and sprawled on the floor.

He stared at her, face impassive.

You understand now, don't you? I still have power, a means of exerting my will. They may have stripped me of my rank and trodden upon my dignity until it was indiscernible from the dust that covered it, but they have not broken me. Not yet. These fangs are still sharp, their poison still potent. I am not to be pitied. If you do not respect me, you will fear me ere the end.

"Then stop sniveling and clean up this mess." Cold and pitiless. When the elf made no move to obey, he seized her by the arm and yanked her to her feet. "If you fail to do so, you will joined the dregs of dinner in their untidy heap."

The elf uttered a breathless scream and scrambled away, fingers curled around the place where he had touched her. She rubbed the flesh of her arm as if it pained her, and perhaps it did. Anger often made him indiscriminate.

Like Stanhope? prodded the uneasy voice of his conscience, and the image of a five-fingered bruise formed in his mind.

An unexpected prickle of guilt. That was different. She is a pupil; this is a beast bred for the express purpose of cleaning my lavatory.

Bitty spared him a watery, contemptuous glare and set about tidying the mess. There was utter silence save for the clink and grind of gathered shards and her wavering voice as she muttered the words to an elvish ditty under her breath. He watched her for a moment as she bent and rose, bent and rose, the fragments cradled in the crook and wattles of her arm like an injured child, and then he spun on his heels and stalked into his bedroom and the soothing promise of his boots. He felt like humming himself.

He listened for a while to the muted sounds of Bitty cleaning, and that, coupled with the hushed murmur of bootblack smoothed over old leather, afforded him a serenity that had long eluded him. Not even the nausea and simmering throb of blood in his temples could dislodge it. Even when the migraine claimed him completely and he was huddled over the toilet, vomiting bile with a queer, gargling ratchet that sounded like Potter to his muffled ears and pressing his forehead to the forgiving porcelain, he fought the urge to smile.