Slightly Off-Kilter 2 (or What's With the Rubber Duck?)

"Are you mad?" Severus demanded angrily, prying her off his lithe body and placing her at arm's distance from him. She blinked owlishly at him and he groaned. "Forget I asked that," he muttered. "What are you blathering about now?"

"Where are those musty old books that are older than dinosaurs that were in your family library?"

Severus gave her a startled glance. "The family library, I suppose."

Gayle gave a Cheshire Cat grin. "Excellent!"

"Why?" His tone was wary.

"Because there's something very special in there for Lord V."

"Lord V?" Albus Dumbledore's dulcet tones washed over them as the elder wizard sauntered into the side room where Severus had toosed her unceremoniously. He was flanked by an amused Remus Lupin and a flabbergasted Minerva McGonagall. "I take, then, you've been having a chat with our dark opponent?"

Gayle smirked. "If you're asking if I made a deal with the Devil, then the answer is yes. I'm going to hand over Harry Potter and Severus Snape in two weeks along with a very ancient spell that Severus conveniently happens to have in his family library."

"I do?" Severus looked confused.

"Yes," she assured him, "you do."

"And you know this how?" demanded Minerva, putting her hands on her hips and arching a fine eyebrow at Gayle.

Gayle's smirk grew larger. "Cuuuuuuuz," she drawled.

"Gayle!" barked Dumbledore and all amusement fled her face. "Be serious!"

"Oh I am, Headmaster!" she retorted. "I am! On one of my many visits to Snape Manor, Severus left me all on my lonesome when he attended some special DeathEater meeting that I wasn't privileged to attend. So, bored stiff out of my mind, I started digging through the older and more, shall we say, decrepit tomes of magic that his family had squirrelled away in the deep recesses of the library. Some hadn't been touched in ages, considering the amount of dust they'd accumulated."

"Gayle," Severus drew out her name in a "get on with it" tone.

"Anyway, sitting there in that picturesque pile of sloppy house elf cleaning, I stumbled across a very old illuminated manuscript of some Snape wizard who'd wandered off on the first Crusade. It took me awhile to translate the stupid thing, but I managed to the gist of the contents, which were some very ancient spells that the wizard had picked up in the Holy Land. The guy was clever, I'll give him that. It seems that he learned quite a few of the languages spoken in the area at that time, even in reading and writing them. He'd also mastered some of the ancient scripts, like cuneiform and Aramaic, giving him quite a range of accumulating ancient spells from scrolls and temples. He put them all together into this manuscript and it has been sitting in the Snape family library since then, completely ignored."

"Fantastic!" murmured Lupin, his brown eyes gleaming strangely.

"Idiot!" Severus snarled churlishly.

"It's okay, baby. It's not your fault you're uneducated!" Gayle patted Severus' cheek maternally.

"I beg your pardon!" He reared back, an offended expression on his face.

"Enough, you two!" thundered Dumbledore. "What spell did you promise Voldemort?"

Gayle looked startled. "How did you know I promised -"

"You just told us!" roared Severus in exasperration. Gayle looked as stunned as the rest of them by this revelation.

"I did?" she asked. It was Severus' turn to look shocked.

"We'll discuss her memory lapse, alarming though it may be, later," Dumbledore told Severus when he opened his mouth to begin a barrage of concerned questions. "For now, Gayle, what spell did you promise Voldemort?"

"The Empty Ka."

"Heavens above!" exclaimed Dumbledore in a shocked, loud voice.

"Are you mad?" Severus asked her for the second time in twenty minutes in an equally loud manner.

Gayle shrugged. "Apparently, but don't worry! I have a plan!" She looked so cheerful about it that everyone was immediately worried. Gayle's plans had this nasty habit of turning people into nervous wrecks.

Severus hadn't been in the family library for years. He hated coming to the Manor and tried to avoid it as much as possible. Since his father's death three years ago, the three Snape daughters and one son avoid the picturesque pile as much as possible. Severus' mother had been a cold, hard woman, dark in her magic and harsh in her manner. Severus' father had been much easier going but a bit of a doormat, easily run roughshod over by his stronger personality wife. Severus' sisters were simpering ninnies who drove him absolutely insane. They were intelligent as he, and easily as cunning, but had the personalities and backbones of paper bags. So the family house elf had gone with the elder sister, Otilia, and the house, inherited by Severus, had been left to ruin. He cared little for it or its contents.

The doors creaked and dust motes floated lazily in the air as the small group of Hogwarts wizards and witches went from room to room to the inner recesses of the house where the library resided. To every question that started with "is that" from Minerva and Remus, Severus answered with a dull, "yes". Dumbledore and Gayle remained silent.

With grunts, Severus and Remus managed to shove the huge oak doors of the library open, revealing a three story room, with a spiral staircase in the center leading to the various floors of shelves crammed with books, scrolls, tomes and who knew what else. While Minerva and Remus gaped in amazement at the library sitting useless at Severus' disposal, Severus headed for the cross-reference file situated on the ground level next to the staircase.

"Its not in there," sing-songed Gayle as she began climbing the stairs.

"What?" asked Severus. "Everything is cataloged in this library."

"Apparently not!" she noted, reaching the first floor landing. "I checked when I discovered the book and the room it was sitting in. Then I casually probed your sisters, who were, as usual, clueless. I asked your father about a missing book and wanted to know if there was another place for books. He said that there were no extra rooms in the library. If there was something missing, it was just missing." Gayle gave a demonic grin. "He either lied to me or didn't know."

By the time she'd finished her explanation, she'd reached the second floor. She went all the way around the circular room until she was across from the stairs. She scowled a moment, peering closely at the book shelves. "Ah! Here it is!" She toggled something on the shelf in the center and the shelves slid to the left, revealing a hidden door inset into the wall.

"Might want to make a note of that for future Snape generations, Severus," Remus commented blandly. Severus shot him a "shut the hell up" look. The four of them pounded up the stairs and followed Gayle into the room.

The room was pristinely clean and gleaming with ivory whitewash. Gold from various illuminated manuscript covers and relics from by-gone times glittered at them from the magical light that didn't seem to ever extinguish. Where it was coming from, they couldn't discern. Gayle went straight to a small bookshelf and toggled another switch.

"You found this just exploring?" asked Minerva suspiciously.

Gayle chuckled. "Okay, actually I was hoping for some skeletons in the family closet to blackmail Severus into marriage, but what I found was much better."

"Humph." The sound came from both Minerva and Severus.

The shelf she'd triggered moved to the right and revealed a huge illuminated manuscript, covered in precious and semi-precious jewels. The small enclosure it resided in was just as scrupulously clean as the room. The gold and silver gilting, with the jewels, made it almost painful to look at in the shimmering light.

Gayle stepped back and allowed Dumbledore to get closer. The older wizard had a better chance of being able to read the manuscript than she, who had only translation spells she'd learned from Severus to help out. With severus low murmurs of spells no one recognized, a bluish haze covered Dumbledore's watery blue eyes.

"This is indeed most fantastic," whispered Albus in amazement. "These are probably the only copies of the spells themselves. Most have been lost for hundreds of generations."

"I'm good."

"You're something all right," agreed Severus in a dry tone.

"If you don't mind, Severus, I would like to remove the manuscript. I can place a protection and preservation charm on it to keep the damage to a minimum. I can translate it easier and more comfortably in my office at Hogwarts."

Severus shrugged. "By all means. Old Binns would probably have a heartattack, again, if he knew this thing was in the school." That drew some laughter from the group.

"Indeed."

Gayle began to bounce in place. "So is my plan doable?"

Albus Dumbledore smiled broadly. "Yes, Gayle, very doable."

Severus groaned. He hated being the bait; and worse, it was going to be with Harry Potter.