Between the Devil and Durmstrang

The morning was productive. The huge pile of laundry was clean and mostly put away. She left a pile of socks to be sorted on the table in her living room. Wronski had proved that he could duplicate the Illumino spell on the ceiling, a book and a pair of shoes. He wasn't enjoying the lesson, his eyes straying to the stack of grimoires on the sideboard. It took constant effort to keep him on track.

"Ok. Let's levitate something. What would you use pick up the book?" Jones asked as she paged through the first year Goshawk book.

Wronski sprawled in the other chair, his eyes closed rubbing at what he claimed was a killer headache. "Leviosa," he muttered.

"That's one way. Do you know any others?"

"How many different ways are there?"

She looked up from the book, marveling at the misery in Wronski's voice. "Lots. I've seen people use a bunch of different spells; some don't say a thing, they just point."

"I don't want real world answers, I just want to learn how to do this stuff."

"Try levitating the book. Use your Leviosa spell."

Eyes still closed, an arm raised limply, the wand barely held. "Leviosa." More enthusiasm could have been had from the book, which sat where it had been placed.

"You're not trying. Put some effort into it."

He groaned, a long, low sound. "I'm tired. I'm hungry, too"

"You're pathetic today. Try one more time and then we'll call it quits for lunch. Just pick up the book and we'll go to the staff room."

"Whining isn't going to help, is it?" One eye opened and blinked hopefully.

"No. Just do it, ok?"

He struggled into a sitting position. "Leviosa!" The book jerked just a bit. That was enough to raise the level of interest. The wand was repositioned and he gave the book his full attention. "Leviosa!" It rose a few inches before it fell. "I think I was better with the other wand." He sounded disgusted and pulled it out of his jacket. "Leviosa!" The book rose two feet in the air and hung suspended in front of him. "See. I wonder why the new one isn't working as well."

"I think it's because you expect the old one to work. You haven't used the new one enough. Can I see it? I've never worked with anything that had a wyvern anything in it." She held out her hand. Reluctantly, Wronski released his newest possession. She swished it around a bit, looking very disappointed. "It doesn't do anything for me. I guess this isn't a match. Can I try the other one?" The response was, if anything, even less enthusiastic. Wronski wrapped his hands around it for several seconds, a sullen look on his face. "C'mon. I won't hurt it." The old wand was handed over. She swished it gently. "Hey! I can feel this one!" More flicking and swishing occurred as she concentrated on the way it felt in different motions. "Leviosa!" The wand was directed at the pile of socks. Erratically, the socks rose. Some rose only a few inches, others skyrocketed to the ceiling and a few spun around on the table. "Hmmm. Maybe one thing." She cancelled the spell and pointed the wand at her stack of grimoires. "Leviosa!" The stack quivered and then slowly rose upwards. "Not bad. A little sluggish, but not too bad. What's the core?"

"No idea. Can I have it back?" He reached out for it.

"Tell you what. I'm going to keep it until you get the new one to work the basic stuff. Then, you can have it back."

He wasn't happy, but the logic appealed to him. "You can keep it until I get four spells down and then I get it back. Ok? Now, let's go see if there's something to eat. I'm hungry."

The staff room had new platters of food in it, many of which had already been sorted through. Jones surveyed the selection critically. The number of choices was, for Durmstrang, large. Her options seemed to be sausages, sausages, sausages, cheese, bread, apples, sausages and some chicken, which appeared to be the favorite since most of it was already gone. With little enthusiasm, she picked out some cheese and bread.

Wronski speared a sausage and slathered it with mustard. He then proceeded to cut it into pieces, all exactly the same size and push them around on the plate. He ate an apple and half of a piece of bread, which he also tore into little pieces. Jones watched the sequence, knowing it for a sign of his discomfort. "Wanna talk about it or would you rather play with your food?"

She got a sneer as a response as each slice of meat was assigned a shred of bread - mustard side down so it could be scooted across the plate. She watched him match every piece of bread and then stack the unmatched slices of meat on top of each other. Very organized. Using the tip of her knife, she pried loose a bit of cheese from a platter and plopped it onto the middle of his plate. "Do something with this, too. Maybe make little shapes to go on top of the bread and meat."

He glared at her for a moment and then the smallest of smiles broke through. "Am I being too anal?"

"You always do something like that when you're upset. I've seen you shred more slices of bread and play with more apples the last few years. You know you feel better when you talk about it. When you stew, you just get whiny and pathetic." She added the last with a large grin.

"Gee. Thanks. You're a great friend, Rose." He looked annoyed but it seemed to shake him out of some of his gloom. "I'm trying to formulate the questions I need to ask. The discussion on wards kinda did it for me."

"We aren't what you thought we were, are we?" She leaned back in her chair to watch him.

"No. No, you're not. I always thought of Lowenstein as this lazy guy who naps all the time. Haken is acting like a cop. Loup has been a wolf most of the week. Gregorov is talking and it's creepy. No one's seen Gilles. Werner throttles me for a stupid bloody napkin. You've got the hots for Mueller. I finally get laid and I find out she's married and never bothered to tell me. It hasn't been a good summer."

The table became the most interesting object in the room while she thought about her reply. Idly, she made tiny cuts along the edge of a piece of cheese. When she reached the corner, she looked up to see a very pale, very scared face. "I never lied to you. Until I came to Durmstrang, I was a professional Dark Arts witch in Seattle. You knew I did blood spells. I even told you what they did and how they worked. I told you about the magic cops. I've probably told you more about my work than I've told other people in my field. It's not nice work. You don't go home at Christmas and talk about it with your family. Most people like me don't have a family. Or, if we do, we stay far away from them and hope no one connects us to them." She looked away again and spoke to the back wall. "I've done a lot of things that aren't very legal. I won't lie and say it was for a good cause. It wasn't. It paid well. I needed money when I started doing the work. I could do a couple of jobs a month and my bills would be paid. I used to set wards and do the usual boring spells for people who were either too lazy to do them themselves or didn't have the magic. Never work for Muggles. They don't like to pay."

"I wasn't planning on freelancing. You weren't trained to kill people, were you?" Wronski sounded unsure and he started shredding a new piece of bread into tiny pieces.

Jones watched as the first third was decimated into crumbs. "No. Someone needed some work done. They had a sob story. You know I'm a sucker for them. It seemed to be the right thing to do at the time. I did a little research. Tried it out on a few rats. Then, I did it. That guy told another guy and he told another. What can I say? It paid a lot better and the work came to me. Someone showed me how to disperse the energies and someone else showed me how to cast another spell on top of the killing one to hide it. It all came together when I met a guy who knew how to help natural defects along."

"Defects? What does that mean?"

"No one is perfect. We all have little things wrong with us. A heart valve that doesn't close quite right. A weak spot in an artery. Some chemical imbalances." Jones stopped and considered shutting up. Wronski really didn't need to know about this sort of thing and she wasn't comfortable talking about it.

"So, if you wanted to kill me, how would you do it so no one would know?" Wronski's eyes had grown huge and there was a tic under his left eye.

"Look, I don't want to talk about this. Let's change the subject." She started to stand but he grabbed her arm.

"No. Tell me. I need to understand. I'm going crazy not understanding. If I'm living with a bunch of murderers, I want to know why they do what they do."

She stared at him and felt cold. She could lie to him, make it palatable, or she could try to explain how it worked. His face was pale and his eyes burned. Murderer. There. He had said it. She didn't doubt that everyone in the department, saving perhaps Rabe, had killed someone in their career. It came with the territory. Even Wronski had killed a prisoner during a demonstration, almost throwing up afterwards, but he had managed to pour a Melting Potion down a man's throat. She wondered how he justified that or had he conveniently forgotten?

"If I wanted to kill you without a trace, the first thing I would do is a variant on the grid spell the Aurors use to determine what spells have been used. It's kind of crude. I'd need to find a dark room and get you into it. I'd cast the spell and look at the results. It produces a sort of outline of you with different colors meaning different things. That's if I don't have a file on you. If you're a smart client and you need the work done quickly, you bring a copy of the target's medical records."

"Target? Why do you call the victim a 'target'?"

"You don't name your food." She hadn't meant it to come out that cold. "It works best if you depersonalize the target as much as possible."

"Depersonalize? You're killing another human being. How personal is that?" His voice rose and he leaned forward.

"You asked. I can stop now." Jones pulled out her cigarettes, her face impassive.

Wronski sat quietly for several minutes, then he began to drum his fingers against the table top, his thoughts turned inwards. "No. I'm sorry. Tell me how this works. What spells are used."

She sucked down a lungful of smoke and held it while she watched him try to swallow his fear. "The Designare spell makes a map of the body. It’s tricky. I don’t really do it right. Mediwizards are the ones to learn it from. I taught myself from a book. It's good enough though. I use Incusare as the additive spell. It's not the right word, but I'm strong enough to force it to show the faults. I know there are other ways to do it, but that's what I use. Loup probably does it differently. She's really picky about verb tenses and rituals. I just use what it takes to get things done. The Incusare adds onto the first spell and will pinpoint weaknesses. I don't usually have a lot of time so I look for obvious things: bad heart, weak blood vessels in the brain, weak bones in the neck… That sort of thing. If they have them, I trigger them. It's quick, it's clean and almost completely undetectable. They don't call the magic cops on those sorts of deaths."

Wronski sat very still, absorbing the information. When he could speak, he said, "I thought everyone killed people with the abracadabera spell."

Jones smiled a bit patronizingly. "Avada Kedavra, the killing curse. No. That one leaves too much of a trace. AKs have been out of style for years. That's the sort of thing Peterson's magic box looks for. Only amateurs use AKs. The human body is both very strong and very fragile. There are lots of ways to kill people." Jones shrugged and looked away again. "Besides, there are a lot of worse things to do to people than kill them."

"Such as?"

"You can take their personality away. Curse them with never-ending pain. Drive them mad. Encourage cancers to slowly eat away at them. Bind them involuntarily so they have to obey you. Work a spell so everything that should happen to them happens to, say, their infant or their aged parent. If you have nightmares about it, someone can probably make it happen. Does that answer your question?" She waited as he tried to analyze what she had just said.

"How many. How many have you." It took a great deal of effort to finish. "How many people have you killed?"

"I haven't kept count. Do you hate me?"

"I can't imagine you killing anyone. I just don't understand." Wronski looked down at his plate, his flotilla of sausage and bread boats arrayed neatly before him. In an instant, he grabbed the plate and flung it against the stone floor, shattering it. "I can't deal with this." She watched as he staggered out the door and turned to go to his office.

She lit another cigarette and stared at nothing as it burnt down to the filter, leaving a long tail of ash on her plate.