Chapter Forty-Seven

Black had sent his own Patronus to Hogwarts with a message for Dumbledore and Lupin. After that I helped him move James and Lily's bodies to the lounge of what we had thought was their safe haven, fools that we were. It had only been about an hour since Riddle had disappeared, and the air still felt full of dull shock. Black had said little during that time, but I could feel him watching me as I moved a hank of Lily's beautiful red hair from where it had fallen over her pale face. She looked as though she was asleep, they both did, as though they did not know that even then their baby son was in Tom Riddle's clutches.

When Sirius did break his silence he went in a direction I didn't expect. 'You loved Lily, didn't you?' he asked.

I couldn't answer, not when she sat on that settee, dead, with her dead husband, the man she had loved, at her side, and her baby Merlin alone knew where. 'We're losing, Black,' I said instead. 'How many more will die while we ride out a crusade of glorious failure?'

He spun to me, his face twisted in rage and fear and grief that I mistook for a moment as being directed at me. He grabbed my cravat just below my throat, and I thought he intended to strangle me there and then. 'You didn't do this,' he hissed instead, his face a mere couple of inches from mine. 'Riddle did this, Pettigrew and Riddle, not you.'

'Perhaps not,' I replied, 'but I didn't prevent it either.'

'Stop it, Severus,' he snarled. 'We don't have the time for the luxury of self-recrimination any more than we have time to grieve. All we can do is go on... even if it means not a man of us is left standing at the end.'

Lupin arrived just as Black let go of my cravat. 'Dumbledore has gone to Spinner's End,' he said, closing his eyes for longer than a blink as he looked at the two bodies. 'He wants to tell Henry in person.'

I nodded, trying to stem the flood of selfish relief that I didn't have to tell Potter that not only were his son and daughter-in-law slain by the Dark Lord's hand, but that his grandson had been abducted by Riddle too.

'What about Harry?' Lupin asked.

'Riddle has him,' I replied, and even to me I sounded defeated, as though the words couldn't be reversed.

'There's something wrong with Riddle,' Black said as we sat at what had been James and Lily's kitchen table, and shoved a cigarette into the corner of his mouth, which he forgot to light. 'Severus thinks he might be injured.'

'But he wasn't involved in any fighting,' Lupin argued.

'I couldn't tell what it was,' I admitted, and just as I said it the stone gave a little throb in my pocket, and I couldn't understand why.

We fell silent for a few moments, I suppose each one of us reflecting, and I began to wonder whether I should leave Black and Lupin at Godric's Hollow and go off and try to find out where Riddle had taken Harry, and I pretended to myself that I thought they might want the time alone to come to some sort of terms with the death of the couple who had been their friends for so long. The plain truth was less noble though. I just didn't know what to do or where to go, and it was only when the fireplace was lit by the merry blaze I recognised as Ethel's fire that I understood I had been waiting for her.

'Severus dear,' she said, her beloved little face etched with concern as it poked through the flames, 'Phineas Black has just told Dumbledore that the shades say the Dark One has arrived in Malfoy Manor with the child.'

*****

The manor was dark as we Disapparated, and looked as though it had lain unoccupied for many a year.

Black pushed the back gate that lead from the Apparition point to the kitchen garden, and so perfect were Ethel's charms that flakes of rust fell from the protesting hinges to speckle the damp moss that grew on the once spotless cobbled path. Black rounded the bend, and he and Lupin went to the back door as I stood watching them from the rusted gateway and checking the manor to find his awareness. It was faint, but there, and I wondered again if Riddle were in some way injured and how that could be.

Black turned to me and nodded, cocking his head to the opened back door as Lupin stepped inside. No light spilled from the vast manor kitchen, but as Lupin turned to duck inside, a glow of wand light lit his features, and Walden Macnair stepped from the doorway, his wand at the werewolf's throat. Macnair had seen Black, but he hadn't seen me. I Disillusioned myself, and as I raised my wand, aiming at the middle of Macnair's chest, someone else came out of the kitchen.

'Recognise this?' Bellatrix hissed in triumph to Black. She was holding the wand I had stolen so many years before, the one Sirius had boasted to Riddle about as being a trophy of youth.

I blasted Macnair with a Stunning Hex, he being the more imminently dangerous. It was enough to distract Bellatrix as Walden fell from Lupin's side, his wand clattering to the ground, but her own Stunning Hex had already left her wand, and nothing on this earth was going to call it back. I watched Sirius spin away, a look of disbelief on his face, as Bellatrix let out a maniacal shriek of laughter and pulled a dagger from the bodice of her dark green dress. She flew at Sirius, plunged the dagger into him, and disappeared.

I was running, twenty steps, maybe thirty, just long enough for Lupin to have dropped to Black's prone form. Even in the darkness I could see both men were ashen, Lupin in shock, Sirius in a different kind of shock.

Lupin stood up as I knelt on the damp ground, fumbling for a pulse, panicking when I couldn't find it, at last remembering to breathe myself when I sensed the faint flutter.

'Stay with him, Severus,' Lupin said in a way I didn't understand. 'I'll get help.' He nodded to the quiet brooding manor, twisting his lip in a hate I could hardly associate with the mild-mannered man I knew the werewolf to be. 'Riddle can wait for a change.'

'You wait with Sirius,' I replied, brushing Black's hair back from where it had fallen across his face. 'The child, Lupin... I must go on.'

Lupin dropped to his haunches again. 'It won't be long,' he murmured quietly, touching Black's hand as he said it, and I had not noticed before how well manicured Sirius's fingers were, how fine-boned his hands, larger, yet almost like those of a woman. 'Better you than me,' Lupin said, giving me a last long look as he stood. 'I'm going for help.' And with that he moved towards the kitchen garden, and a few moments later I heard the faint sound as he Apparated away, leaving me holding Black as the darkness of all sorts crept around us.

'Can you hold on, Black?' I asked, my voice sounding shockingly normal. 'You did once before,' I said. 'Lupin's gone for proper help. He won't be long.'

His breath was rattling in his chest, much in the same way that Lupin's had sounded that awful night at the Shack when we had gone to him. It was only when he coughed though, gasping in some tearing agony, and bringing foamy red froth to the sides of his mouth, bloodying the corners of his moustache, and disappearing into his beard, that I fully realised his wounds were mortal. Perhaps then I saw why Lupin had left me alone with him, perhaps the werewolf had always known what I had never understood myself, what had been beyond my comprehension.

'You asked me once... it seems so long ago now... who had stolen my heart,' he murmured, a half whisper that seemed to exhale with his tortured breath. 'I just want you know, before it's too late...' He trailed off, his eyelids fluttering and then opening again, as though he were denying what his body already knew.

I was about to stop him, to tell him that I didn't want to know... but what did it matter in the grander scheme of things? I, who had lain with the Dark Lord, could surely find it within me to let Sirius Black believe I loved him too: such a small price to pay for what we had been through together. He had never let me down, and I could not let him down then.

He died in my arms, held like a lover, the light in his eyes fading first, and then the beat of his heart, but it was his magic that I watched until the end, as it danced in a halo of blue flames around him, and finally flickered once and disappeared, leaving me completely alone and utterly bereft. And the love rose within me, belated, and as hot and urgent as that of quite a different sort. I felt a howl of fury trying to choke me, and found I was clenching the white stone as though to crush it for daring to allow this to happen. Nothing was worth the lives of the men who had called me friend.

I had to leave him, just leave him lying in the mud, and go on, as the bloodlust thrummed in my veins, filling my mouth with the taste of hate. I had to go on. Riddle was somewhere in that manor, and he had Lily's child with him, James Potter's son. I was almost at the back door, had just stepped over Macnair's unconscious form when I realised I was no longer alone.

'Severus?' Bellatrix asked, hardly surprising me as she slipped from the shadows. 'What are you doing here?' Her eyes glinted with suspicion. 'Does our Lord know you are here?'

'Our Lord?' I asked. 'You may have him all to yourself, hellcat.' I found the wand in my hand was aimed at her breast, and the words I had in youthful folly sworn never to use fell from my lips once more, and I watched her hurtle back in a cocoon of green light, the distrust on her face turning to shock, her hand frozen in the act of dipping again to the bodice of her dress. Such was my hate that I was only sorry that I hadn't the time to feel the pleasure of choking her life out of her with my bare hands. I kicked her body over and saw that it had not been her dagger that she had reached for, but a Time Turner that she wore on a chain around her neck, and I recalled it was the one that Narcissa had used to visit Lucius when she had come to him with her proposal of marriage. I only wondered why I had forgotten all about it, not that it would have changed anything that had happened. These were fleeting thoughts though as I ripped it from her neck, if they coalesced at all. The past was past, and even a Time Turner couldn't awaken the dead; it was all so much heartbreak anyway.

I set my shoulders as I turned away, and, Merlin forgive me, I killed Macnair too, as he lay unconscious and unarmed. But for spitting at Lucius's feet when he'd secured him to a scaffold, and because I'd sworn to myself that I would, I killed him in cold blood, and felt no regret at having done so.

*****

I sensed the atmosphere the moment I slipped through the back door; it was the same tightening I had felt when Black and Potter had raised their shield to keep Salazar from recognising Mordestone, and it gave me hope that Riddle had not been drawn to the catacombs, and let me understand why his awareness had felt so faint to me. It wasn't Potter and Black this time though, nor any of the others who had kept the shield in place that day; this was infinitely more subtle, and I knew it was the ghosts of Malfoy Manor. I knew Riddle was there though, even in the heavy atmosphere I could feel him.

I had my hand clasped on the white stone as I made my way through the rooms on the ground floor, where the only welcome was Ethel's charm of cobwebs and soot-blackened hearths, and doors hanging on rusty hinges. Malfoy Manor was as quiet as the tomb it was.

I made my way by wand light to the great entrance hall where once had hung portraits of generations of Malfoys, and stifled the tearing regret when I saw the dusty upright of the mahogany banister where Sirius Black had concealed himself the night I took the Dark Mark. The silent ghosts of Malfoy Manor thronged the empty hall, and I could almost feel them urging me on, bolstering my resolve, and I felt my breath catch in my chest as one turned to me and then glanced to what had been the grand staircase. It was Lucius Malfoy. Perhaps the rage and the grief kept me going; perhaps they were one and the same, and I let them fill my heart until there was no room for anything but revenge.

*****