Chapter Fifty-Two—A Light In The Dark

Although he’d only been out of his quarters for an hour, Snape felt like he hadn’t slept for three days. The level of concentration it was taking just to stay consistently upright or move in the direction he wanted to was proving to be incredibly draining. Given the luxury of choice, he would have stayed out of sight until his balance and muscular control were back to normal, but as always, there wasn’t time for such indulgence.

At some point during his incapacity, it had snowed. The muddy marsh that the grounds had been hammered into by the rain was now hidden under a muffling blanket of white that hurt his eyes. It forced him to squint, further exacerbating his ability to balance convincingly on two feet. The savagely cold air was a blessing, though—it kept the fatigue at arm’s length.

After looking in the mirror earlier, Snape realised how damaged his eyes were. There was hardly any white of the sclera to be found, the irises surrounded by red from burst blood vessels. That, coupled with the swelling and bruising around his eyes, gave him an altogether hideous appearance. It caught him off-guard when he saw it, and he frantically searched his memory for the incident that would explain the injury. Unless Parr had punched him in both eyes while he was unconscious, he had to chalk it up to an effect of the untying of the knot in his mind.

Fortunately, heavy doses of Anti-Swelling Solution and careful usage of Exsanguis removed the worst of it, but Snape was still left with rather red-tinged eyes—the sort that betrayed a night of heavy drinking which wouldn’t have been out of place on Lupin.

His stomach had finally settled. He was extremely glad of that and even managed to keep down some simple food that Folter had brought. The smell of the Owlery threatened that stability. Ordinarily, the heavy uric odour, whilst unpleasant, wasn’t that sickening once one got used to it. All his senses had been turned up to full and ignored any attempt to modify or control their input into his brain. Snape had been forced to breathe through his mouth whilst trying to retrieve a tightly rolled strip of parchment off an owl’s leg, but that meant that now he could taste the bird dust and droppings instead of just smelling them. Fortunately, the white-bibbed messenger didn’t fuss too much at being relieved of its burden. Kettering’s birds were generally very well-behaved, and there had been little trouble in handling them since their owner had died. It had taken a couple of near-misses before Snape realised that as long as he wore Kettering’s pendant, he wouldn’t lose his finger to a brutally sharp beak. The birds didn’t even need to see the pendant to know it was around his neck, but they made it clear they wouldn’t obey him unless he wore it.

It was as he was making his way slowly down the icy stone steps from the Owlery that he saw Dumbledore heading in his direction. It was possible the Headmaster was on his way to send or receive a message of his own, but it would still require some interaction that Snape just wasn’t in the mood for right now. He tried to keep the expression on his face as neutral as possible as the Headmaster lingered at the bottom of the flight of stairs, the gold thread in his deep purple overcoat glinting in the brittle winter sun.

Dumbledore frowned slightly at Snape’s cautious decent but felt no need to question it, perhaps attributing it to the iciness of the stone.

“I missed you at breakfast, Severus. I trust everything is alright?”

Snape squinted at him, trying not to wince.

“Yes,” he responded laconically, wishing the man would go away.

“I’m afraid I have some rather worrying news that I require your assistance with,” Dumbledore continued after a pause at Snape’s somewhat terse reply.

Snape remained silent, looking at the Headmaster steadily through narrowed eyes and keeping his mind as blank as possible.

Dumbledore shook his head slightly and held out a hand to indicate they should move away from the Owlery. So, he’d come to find Snape specifically.

“I’ve received word of more Ministry disappearances,” the older man explained as they crunched through the snow back to the castle. “All of them are concerning, naturally, but one in particular troubles me.”

A rather nasty headache began to bloom behind Snape’s eyes, making him wish he’d stayed in bed.

“An Unspeakable vanished a few days ago with no clue as to why.” The Headmaster draw his overcoat a little tighter around himself as a brief gust of wind pulled at the fabric of their clothing and whipped up tiny swirls of snow around their feet. “I believe Minister Bones is extremely concerned over it but has made no public announcement or even made the disappearance widely known within the MLE itself.”

Snape sniffed, irritated at the way the cold air made his nose run. The Head of the MLE would undoubtedly be worried about one of her precious Unspeakables going AWOL. She would also want to keep word of that disappearance as tightly under her control as possible. As it was, the MLE’s relationship with the Department of Mysteries was one of the worst kept secrets in magical government, so for Bones to speak out about the disappearance of an Unspeakable would not only bolster the link, it would bring into question the MLE’s abilities to keep track of their most covert employees.

The Ministry as a whole was having a rough time keeping news of disappearances out of the papers. People were twitchy enough as it was without cracks appearing in their confidence in the wizarding world’s governing body. In uncertain, potentially dangerous times, people needed to feel assured by those that led and protected them. Who knew what was really going on behind the façade the Ministry was holding up?

“I need you to find out what’s happened to this man.”

Snape stopped walking rather abruptly and had to suppress a burst of dizziness as it felt like brain kept moving forward independently of his body. He cleared his throat to buy himself a few seconds. Dumbledore stopped also, a faint expression of expectance on his face.

“Forgive me, Headmaster, but surely an Auror would be more appropriate for that task,” Snape pointed out. “I can’t imagine the MLE welcoming my investigations, however subtle I make them.” A thought occurred to him. “Unless… you have some suspicion as to this man’s allegiance.”

Dumbledore exhaled heavily, his breath pluming out in a white cloud in front of him. “I’ve heard… doubts expressed by others as to Ted Beresford’s political tendencies,” he admitted. “I wonder if his disappearance is by his own choice.”

“To what end?”

Dumbledore shrugged slightly.

Snape stared at his boots; his hair fell forward to shield his face from the Headmaster.

“I’ve not heard of a Beresford showing Death Eater involvement or sympathies; but then, it’s unlikely I would, especially if he is an Unspeakable. The Dark Lord would prize such an individual highly and hold him very close.”

“Hence my concern,” said Dumbledore and continued ahead, forcing Snape to follow him. “What news from your contacts? Has there been any word on who might be involved in drawing Harry into the Tri-wizard Tournament?”

“Not even a rumour. If anything, various parties are eying each other, wondering who managed it. Surely Moody has not failed to sniff out the perpetrator?” He couldn’t keep the sneer of contempt either off his face or out of his voice.

“The process of investigation continues,” Dumbledore murmured. Was it his imagination or was there a strain of disquiet about the Headmaster?

Moody was an Auror with singular determination. That the cause of Potter’s allegedly unwilling involvement in the Tournament remained undiscovered even with Moody’s near-rabid searching would unsettle Dumbledore. They had debated as to whether or not there was more than one person involved in the plot, whether that person or persons remained at Hogwarts or had fled once Potter’s name had been flung successfully from the Goblet of Fire, what the whole plot achieved other than putting Potter’s life in serious jeopardy that something more directly threatening didn’t. Too many holes, too little information. The lack of progress in determining the perpetrators was unusual. Aurors, those with and without Order affiliations, had been in and out of the castle, each time drawing a blank. According to Dumbledore, Parr had been unable to provide any enlightenment. However, that didn’t mean that she didn’t know. Snape was sure that what she kept to herself was far greater than what she revealed. Any motivations behind a possible silence would be hard to determine.

“I need you to go to the abandoned den today, Severus. Tonight,” said Dumbledore, interrupting Snape’s thoughts. “Kingsley tells me that the local council has listed the building for redevelopment, so there could soon be far more human traffic in and out of the place than we had anticipated.”

“Could that not be the reason why the den was vacated?”

Dumbledore tipped his head from side to side, as if considering the question, but Snape knew that the man had asked it of himself already.

“There was no development slated for the property until last Friday—well after the lycanthropes left. So, unless they had warning from someone working in the local council, I don’t believe that could be the reason. Still, it can’t be completely discounted. Remus and Chara will be at the den at midnight, but I will be at the safe house two hours after that to hear of what you find.”

A carefully folded piece of parchment was held out to him between Dumbledore’s fingers. Snape looked at the address and returned the paper to the Headmaster, who reduced it to ash with an Incendio.

“The only access is through the back door. How is Chara’s recovery progressing?”

A rather peculiar pressure exerted itself against Snape’s mind. He stared at Dumbledore sharply, suspecting the man of surreptitious Legilimency. Odd. He had never been able to detect the Headmaster’s use of it but there had been several times when he had suspected it, despite the absence of proof. There was a particular way the man tightened the muscles under his eyes, a subtle manner of angling his head that he only manifested at certain times. Was it possible that with the rather brutal treatment Snape’s mind had gone through over the preceding two days, he was now far more sensitised to picking up on the use of Legilimency, even by one so reputedly adept as Dumbledore? If so, would such sensitivity last, or was it like bruised flesh that screamed at the barest touch, that in time would heal? He tried to hold onto the stony blankness, keeping a semblance of privacy behind it, but the anger at the possible incursion threatened to fracture the barrier.

“Her condition is variable,” he eventually replied, voice impassive, stuffing the prickliness he felt deep down inside himself. His headache began to spread down the bones of his neck and along his shoulders.

“And how is she today?”

The wind returned, cutting through their clothes and chilling their skin. Snape refused to acknowledge the coldness while the Headmaster rubbed his own hands together to keep blood flowing through his fingers.

“I have not seen her.”

Dumbledore instigated their return to the castle once more, his overcoat flapping back behind him.

“Well, she and Remus left for London a few hours ago, so her health must be sufficient, otherwise Poppy wouldn’t have let her out of the infirmary. Speaking of which, perhaps you should go there and get something for your headache. Your eyes are very bloodshot.”

“Your concern for my health is appreciated, Headmaster,” Snape answered through gritted teeth as he turned into the icy wind, disguising his annoyance with empty words in order to end the conversation as rapidly as possible.

There were several reasons he didn’t want to be involved in the matter of the abandoned den. For one, Lupin would be there, and Snape’s temper was already well down the path to cantankerous without that flea-bitten itinerant winding him up. Secondly, he didn’t want anything to do with lycanthropes. Especially male ones. It was a prejudice he’d never let go of, didn’t want to let go of—they didn’t deserve tolerance. Dirty, violent, uncontrolled and uncontrollable animals. Their total isolation from the rest of society was the only solution until their affliction could be cured once and for all—the disease obliterated entirely, stamped out of existence.

He stood in the inky shadow of the doorway opposite the warehouse, his hands opening and closing into fists at his sides, trying to ignore the damp, fetid reek of the garbage heaped up against door behind him. Undoubtedly, the smell inside the abandoned den would be worse. The outside was already a significant dissuasion to the curious. Windows set high in the brick were all shattered, the embedded wire frame that had once nestled in the glass bent and pulled and wrenched aside into gaping, empty sockets that the darkness stared out of. The odd fragments of torn fabric and plastic that were hooked on sharp metal and pointed glass flapped gently in the breeze that sighed down the street; tattered flesh clinging to a skull. Graffiti, much of it illegible, warred with bill posters for space on the brick, but the latter seemed aged. Even defacers had eventually shunned this place. Perhaps they had seen something that frightened them. Perhaps they had sensed the danger within. Perhaps worse had befallen them.

The greatest cause of his hesitation was the certainty of Parr’s presence. There were so many unsettling emotions that had arisen from the enforced interaction between the Striker and himself that he didn’t clearly know where he stood. He was angry at the pain he’d gone through. Bitter at the way she’d seen him incapacitated. Resentful that her hand in this game was stronger than his. Hurt that she still withheld things he wanted to know. That made him blink. He would not consciously have used that word to describe how he felt about being treated like an outsider, as someone who was not worthy to be privy to the knowledge she had.

It had always been a source of intense dissatisfaction to him, to be kept apart, to be excluded from knowledge. It was a form of elitism that grated, one more way to make him a pariah. At times it felt as if it was done with a malicious deliberateness, as if to say ‘See how inadequate you are? You will know only through our acceptance. And you shall never have that!’ It drove him to seek out knowledge that others eschewed or couldn’t comprehend or shied away from in misplaced fear. The things that people did in ignorance frequently disgusted him, as if they were proud that they were unenlightened to the objective reality, as if they were content to move through their lives with a level of stupidity that bordered on childish in its insouciance. Snape took any attempt at withholding information as a personal affront, regardless of how trivial that information turned out to be. It was the denial itself that was the greatest insult. Even he realised the immaturity of his reaction—like a child refused something it had decided it wanted—but it was a trait that was so much a part of him and he dreaded letting go of it lest it leave him at the mercy of what others decided he should and shouldn’t know. And from the effortless way the vast majority of the public could be hoodwinked and swayed by propaganda, he found himself fighting tooth and claw to remain above them and their almost ovine acquiescence.

Hurt. Anger, he could understand—an emotion he was far more familiar with, far more comfortable with. Hurt was… worrying. He had expected something and been refused. What that was, he wasn’t sure. He wasn’t certain he wanted to know. Anger was the appropriate response, the usual response. Hurt suggested something far more complex, and Snape didn’t like that idea at all.

He shuddered slightly under the unwavering gaze of the warehouse, trying to suppress a prickle of discomfort that threatened to creep up his spine. He didn’t like the way it squatted there, poorly lit by the street lights, its roof patched with melting snow like blotches of mould. He exhaled heavily out of his nose to try and dislodge the smell of… who knew what that was rotting under his feet. It was difficult not to fidget. Standing still allowed the ache running through his bones to push its way to the front of his awareness. Movement seemed to alleviate it, but now wasn’t the time for that.

She’d told him he was seevy. Dual, she called him. He still had no idea what that meant. For all he knew, it could be an insult, a derogatory term that she was permitted to use on him because of his ignorance of its meaning. She could be lying to his face in claiming he was seevy. It could be a ruse to get him to do what she wanted, a subtle deception that he missed in his insatiable curiosity. After all, it was clear that Lupin knew more than he did about seevy, and he wasn’t even one of them. Or was he? It might explain the apparent closeness between Parr and the werewolf, a closeness that did not form a part of any other of Parr’s relationships with those around her. Seevyism had obviously found its way into magical society, albeit in what Parr termed the stunted forms of Occlumency and Legilimency. Who knew what other traits had arisen from the cross-breeding?

However, Snape’s judgement was that if Lupin had any seevy traits, they were exceedingly weak. The man had no mental adeptness that even approximated a poor grasp of Occlumency or Legilimency. Any heightened senses could be easily attributed to his lycanthropy, and even they only came out close to the full moon. No. It was unlikely that Lupin was seevy. His access to the knowledge came from his employment by the MLE to look into this reclusive society. Parr had even admitted that she told Lupin as little as she possibly could. Once again, evidence that she was capable of manipulating those around her to suit her needs.

Although Lupin had never said it, Snape suspected that the shabby lycanthrope had found Parr during her incarceration by Greyback. Why she had been found and her Handler had not was a mystery. Parr would have been in an appalling physical state. Lupin had said that she’d been beaten black and blue and her left leg shattered. Perhaps she looked to Lupin as a saviour of sorts, someone who’d pulled her out of Greyback’s clawed grip. She’d said she owed him, and Parr was exacting in matters of debt.

He stuck his hands in the deep pockets of his overcoat to protect his fingers from frostbite and drew his shoulders in towards his ears. It was very close to midnight, if not already past the hour, and knowing Lupin’s rather fluid sense of time, Snape could easily be stuck waiting here for another half an hour.

Somewhere in the distance, a lorry rumbled along a main road, rippling the cavernous silence momentarily. It echoed the grinding pain in his head that he had been unable to shift for the entire day.

It was becoming clearer to Snape that seevy still retained ties with the magical world, ties that the Ministry was clearly unaware of. They had found ways to be a part of magical society, hiding right in plain sight. If what Snape suspected was true, that two seevy owned the very bookshop he’d been into to source material on their own kind, then they could as easily be in far more influential positions. Perhaps even within the Ministry itself. Such placement would require exquisite care in order to avoid detection. It most likely involved collusion with those already accepted in magical society. Snape had been unable to determine whether a seevy could also wield magic. Some genetic traits mixed poorly with others, and seevyism could be one of those. Regardless, it was a strong possibility that there were witches and wizards sympathetic to seevy, for whatever reasons, that actively worked to allow this infiltration into magical society. Witches and wizards that would be severely, possibly mortally punished by either side for revealing the reality. Parr had already made it clear that her life was forfeit amongst her own kind for seeking asylum. Was that forfeiture due to anger at the threat to seevy independence or as an assurance that the true relationship between magical and seevy societies would never become public knowledge?

Snape had enough duplicity, secrecy and covertness going on in his life. Did he really want to embroil himself in more? He was starting to realise how prophetic Dumbledore’s warning to him not to go digging in uncertain ground had been. Was it possible for him to step back from it? If he took Parr’s claim that he was seevy as the truth, then she may not allow him to retain any autonomy. The agreement they had made truly was a double-edged sword. Both could get what they wanted, but at what cost? It seemed the best option open to him was to meet the conditions of that agreement as soon as possible and extricate himself from any connection with seevy. He had more pressing responsibilities to attend to.

That thought flared a strange warmth in him that the night air had been leaching away gradually over the past twenty minutes, the determination to be rid of Parr in every way steeling his resolve. Yes, better to wash his hands of any connection with her as soon as possible. He didn’t like the effect she had on him. It was far too easy for her to unsettle him, to confuse him. The emotional mess she’d left him in was intolerable. He laid the blame for that descent into overwhelming carnal sensation he had experienced earlier that day squarely at her feet. It was a blatantly disingenuous way for her to bind him to her, akin to forcing a highly addictive drug down his throat against his will. Did she honestly believe him weak enough to bend to its effects, like a mindless animal that answered the call of rut without hesitation?

The familiar, acrid taste of anger and resentment was back in his mouth. Snape welcomed it even as it aggravated the raw pounding of his headache and the wiry soreness that scratched at every bone in his body. Each thud of his heartbeat made the pain intensify as if the pulsing push of blood was enough to aggravate his nerves, but he used it to strengthen his ill-temper into a harsh coldness. How he hated her for playing him like a fool!

Snape squinted slightly as the vision in his right eye began to distort, almost warping like poorly-blown glass. He closed the affected eye, but the sensation of this visual disturbance pressed into his head as if a fingertip pushed gently into his brain. Whilst it was neither painful nor unpleasant, it was unsettling. He was about to free one of his hands from its pocket to rub at his eye when two figures drifted out from the shadows between the sickly pools of light gasped out by the street lamps. Snape frowned, briefly alarmed at the towering silhouette looming behind Lupin. He’d forgotten how tall Parr could get.

They walked past on the pavement opposite the disused shop where he lurked, certain, but unhurried. The entrance to the warehouse was down a small laneway that branched off from the street, a narrow access for delivery vehicles that would have once carried their cargo from this place.

Parr’s gloved hand reached out and touched Lupin’s back less than a handful of steps from the laneway. The tattily dressed man paused, his head swivelling slightly toward the wall of the warehouse. Listening. His shoulders slumped, in exasperation if Snape’s guess was correct.

The werewolf turned and crossed the street, heading unerringly in Snape’s direction.

“How long were you going to skulk there, making us wait for you?”

Lupin peered into the darkened doorway through the strands of his greying hair, a heavy line set between his brows.

“I do not skulk, Lupin. I just do not find it necessary to announce my presence. Would you prefer I stand in the middle of the road setting off thunderclaps so that you could find me? A little unwise, considering the circumstances.”

Snape stuck his nose in the air and slid out of his hiding spot and past Lupin before the man could form a retort.

Parr waited, motionless, near the laneway, still facing down the street. A black statue on guard. Snape pointedly didn’t look at her as he walked past, but he did notice that the warping of his vision ceased the moment he crossed her path. He should’ve known she’d have some involvement in messing up his senses. It seemed to be all she was capable of, lately.

He stopped at the small postern set in the huge double doors of the loading dock, refusing to be the first into the dilapidated building. If anyone was going to get their head snapped off, it was going to be Lupin, but the werewolf swept his hand out to offer Snape right of way.

“You first, Severus. I need to be the last in so I can cast the Skin.”

Snape’s head turned slowly in order to fix the man with a stony glare.

“Are you suggesting I am incapable of casting a simple spell, Lupin?”

The werewolf pulled a face of unconvincing sufferance at him, his outline bracketed by Parr’s featureless shadow, swathed as she was in her Striker black.

“Or perhaps you are inferring that its use did not occur to me?”

Lupin tutted softly and pushed the pitted and splintered door inwards, puncturing another miserable hole into the building. Parr slipped in after him, dropping to all fours briefly in order to fit herself under the lintel.

Snape stared after them, vanished into the darkness, the waft of dereliction and foreboding sighing out to cover him. It wasn’t trepidation that made him hesitate, just a plain unwillingness to submerge himself in the carcass that had sheltered so many wretched people. That had imprisoned them, hidden them as they struggled to survive, unwanted by two worlds that despised and feared them in equal measure.

A gentle, cold light flushed, casting jagged jet shadows like rotten teeth. Snape clenched his jaw and bent slightly to step into that open mouth, the fabric of his overcoat snagging on the frayed wood of the doorframe. A chill of revulsion ran through him as he closed the door behind him and cast the ward that not only warned them if another entered the building, but also hemmed them inside, like a grave’s embrace—invisible yet confining. It was a simple spell, needing little magic but requiring a deftness to pare the layer as thin as possible in order to avoid detection from any outside its shield. It also had a limited lifespan. They would need to move fast.

The smell was dreadful. Far worse than he thought it would be. He nearly lost what little dinner he had in his stomach. The rancid oil of unwashed skin and acrid tang of sweaty bodies failed to drown out the sharp pungency of urine. The intensity of it was overpowering. A part of him, admittedly small, was grateful that there was no stench of rotten flesh, but there was a peculiar sourness that he couldn’t attribute a physical cause. It smelled like desperation. Despair. A deadness not of flesh but of spirit.

The loading dock was strewn with rubbish and broken furniture. Most of the refuse lay in the lower portion of the bay, but even the concrete steps against the left wall and leading up to the mezzanine were almost obscured by the crumpled newspaper, ruined clothing and disintegrating cardboard that littered them. The guard rail around the mechanical goods lift was bent harshly into a crooked vee. Here and there, clumps of wadded material marked a sleeping place. A rusted and soot-cloaked metal oil drum sat underneath a hole in the roof—a crude fireplace, long cold. The walls were cragged with parallel gouges, smeared with splashes of dark that were interspersed with crude statements and slogans painted by the former occupants in frustration and self-loathing.

A thin line of luminescence ran around the perimeter of the enclosure at head height, not so bright that it hurt the eyes, but with enough strength to show the interior as clearly as they needed. It was an ingenious spell, a variation on Lumos that provided far greater coverage than a light from the tip of a wand. Snape found himself wondering if the spell was a creation of Lupin’s or something that he had picked up from another. Much as Snape liked to think Lupin was an idiot, he wasn’t that dim, and had occasionally shown brief moments of brilliance while a student. It had never been a sustained effort, which was just one more blot against his name, as far as Snape was concerned.

Parr stood near the centre of the room, her cowl drawn back and her right arm raised out to the side, index and middle fingers pointed straight up. Whatever the sign meant, it was clear that Lupin knew. He stood some paces behind Parr, waiting. Waiting as if they didn’t have limited time. Waiting as if standing there, not doing anything, didn’t bother him in the slightest.

Flecks of white began to fall through the hole in the roof, drifting down silently, catching the bluish light to sparkle and glint as they fell down into ruin.

They waited.

Parr’s head turned slowly as if she were looking up to and around the roof, strands of her hair slipping free from the lowered cowl and down across her shoulders, her face hidden, her expression an unknown.

Time passed.

Snape pushed down the rising nausea and irritation into a small, hard mass in his stomach. Lupin twiddled his fingers of his wandless hand and stared at a discarded shoe to his left, chewing at the inside of his cheek.

Parr’s hand dropped slowly to her side.

Lupin moved from sleeping spot to sleeping spot, pushing objects aside with his foot. Snape saw him bend down to pick up a used match that had been split carefully down the wood to the head, the tattered remains of a cannabis joint wedged between the two halves.

There was never any doubt in Snape’s mind that they’d find evidence of drug use here. It just remained to be seen to what extent that usage went. He walked slowly away from Lupin and around the shattered remains of an office desk that lay overturned, one leg torn clean off and its drawers nowhere to be found; fuel for the fire, most likely. He made sure that he could see Parr out of the corner of his eye. She hadn’t moved from her spot, but her face was turned up to the hole in the roof, watching the snowflakes as they descended, the outline of her bowed profile revealed finally.

Glass crunched under Snape’s boot. He looked down to see what was left of an empty bottle, the torn label giving him enough information to know it once contained alcohol. Further along, almost hidden by damp, flattened cardboard, lay a discarded syringe, its needle bent to one side, and dark, dried blood spotting the inside of the barrel. He couldn’t bring himself to touch it, but he needed this object to determine precisely what it was its former owner, or owners, had been addicted to. A slender, oak-wood box was brought out from the inside pocket of his coat and a Mobilis employed to pick the damaged syringe up off the filthy floor. Even the protection of the wood wasn’t enough to stop his skin from crawling at the disease-ridden implement.

Snape was just binding the box shut when Parr moved. She swept around the oil drum and made for the corridor opposite the top of the concrete stairs. She cleared the flight in one leap, falling to all-fours just before the first step. There was a muffled clatter as a loose tube of railing was knocked aside.

Lupin continued his search in the bay, unconcerned at Parr’s exit. He appeared to be muttering to himself as he scanned the floor, pushing aside torn cloth with the tip of his wand. Snape watched him for a moment before following Parr up the stairs. He did so with considerably less grace as he futilely attempted to avoid treading on the worst of the detritus. The ring of light around the wall snaked down the dank corridor, in and out of side rooms that were all as wretched as each other, caverns of temporary shelter sunk in squalor, their entrances devoid of doors but partially blocked by furniture and boxes.

He found her in the room farthest from where they had entered the building. It was little more than a storeroom. Boxes lay scattered, ransacked of their contents and crushed into sorry forms. Rusty nails littered the floor, cast about like seeds from which a powdery brown bloomed. A broken window high in the wall and facing out into the street allowed occasional flecks of snow to bluster in, carried by a strengthening wind. Opposite, Parr crouched, the unnaturally lengthened fingers of her now un-gloved hand running along the bottom of the plaster wall. At first, Snape couldn’t tell what she was looking at, but as he stepped closer, he saw the roughly carved symbol that her fingertip traced along: a circle poised on the end of an inverted cruciform, a concave arcing line splitting the volume unevenly. A crescent balanced on the point of a knife.

“What is it?” he asked before he could stop himself.

The knife was in her hand in the blink of an eye, its hilt rammed into the wall to shatter the plaster into broken pieces and dust, the symbol obliterated.

Parr unfolded from her crouch smoothly to face him, the index finger of her left hand held in front of her mouth, warning him to silence. Then she was gone from the room.

Snape stared at the dent in the wall until the sound of breaking wood pulled him away from it.

Objects were being thrown from one of the side rooms and into the corridor in a steady stream. Lupin’s voice calling Parr’s name from the loading bay echoed off the walls. Her black-shrouded figure streaked out from the room whose contents had been evacuated and vanished into another. More objects were flung out. A bottle smashed with a harsh tinkle, the fragments reflecting the light from the strip of Lumos set along the walls. Parr flowed into another room just as Lupin reached the top of the stairs. He disappeared into the space after her. Voices drifted out, indistinct.

As Snape walked past the rooms Parr had been emptying, he saw that she had cleared aside any occluding objects to reveal more evidence of drug use. Loose cigarette papers and filters, a warped metal spoon, a small zip-lock plastic bag with a few flecks of dried plant matter left in it, long strips of material most likely used as tourniquets, razor blades dinted and stained. Some he gathered, others he left laying where they were.

Lupin turned towards Snape as he entered the last room, the muttered exchange between the werewolf and the Striker cut short.

“What did you find?”

Snape flicked a glance at Parr who was standing just behind Lupin. She returned his look calmly, the blue light turning her eyes a rich malachite and her hair a cold steel.

“Various objects typical of drug use.”

Lupin frowned.

“Are you able to determine the nature of the substances they were using?”

“This place is ill-suited to analysis of the evidence, Lupin,” he replied coolly, chancing another look at Parr. She narrowed one of her eyes at him and the pain in him vanished like a drop of ink in water.

“Chara believes they left by choice.”

Snape blinked at him, momentarily disorientated by the disappearance of the ache in his head and his bones that he’d been nursing all day.

“And what has led Miss Parr to that conclusion?” He stared at her sourly.

“There are no signs of either forced entry or rapid departure,” Lupin replied with a slight shrug.

“This place is a sty,” Snape retorted, noting the appearance of a rather pinched look on Parr’s face. “How could she possibly tell that with any certainty?” Was her change in expression due to his blunt question or from the pain she’d sucked off him? It could just as easily be both.

Lupin’s mouth compressed into a thin line that betrayed his rapidly dwindling patience at Snape’s ratty attitude.

“From her extensive experience gained over a number of years, I should imagine, Severus. If you have cause to doubt it, please enlighten us.”

“Just because they left without violence does not mean it was done willingly. A choice between death and eviction is still a choice, no matter how unpalatable the options are.”

Lupin sighed gently. “Something that Chara has pointed out to me.” He stepped over a pile of ripped magazines. “As it is, we still cannot tell who or what caused them to leave.”

Snape opened his mouth and immediately experienced what he could only describe as a sharp flick to the brain that caused words to die on his tongue. He glanced at Parr who opened her eyes very wide and shook her head incrementally. Whatever she’d found in the far room, she didn’t want Lupin to know about. Curious. Snape closed his mouth.

Lupin, his eyes trained on the floor in order to avoid tripping over the mess, noticed nothing.

“We should leave. This place gives me the creeps.” The last words were spoken quietly under his breath as he edged around the wrecked metal supports of a chair. Parr loped smoothly after him and past Snape, the hem of her overcoat flaring out to brush against the side of his leg.

Later.

It was a word not spoken but felt. A concept unarticulated but relayed. A promise woven of feeling and scent. That he could understand it worried him even as it mollified him. Bait that he couldn’t refuse.