Chapter Fifty-Six—Track

A/N: My apologies that this has been so long in arriving. Real life has done little but punch me in the face over the past few months.

"You move fast when there is need."

Her voice floated gently down to him from the darkened window...a curled tendril of approval, but it was a feather that rested on the surface of murky water.

"I had help," was his murmured response.

"Indeed?" She was less approving of that. "Was that altogether prudent?"

"I have no reason to think otherwise."

He hoped Parr would hear the truth of that for there was little else he could impart to convince her.

Snape didn't know which disturbed him more: that Folter kept secrets from him, or that he had been so affected by that revelation. In all honesty, she didn't owe him the kind of loyalty that he had expected, that he had assumed she gave him. He couldn't deny, at least to himself, that he expected a great deal of people and consequently was always disappointed. They all failed to live up to his expectations, set so high that they couldn't possibly hope to reach them. But, stubborn as he was, he refused to lower the bar that he demanded people jump over to prove their worth. There was a dichotomy in him that clutched tightly onto this unreasonable, unrelenting ambition and simultaneously reviled its unattainability. There was scorn for those that couldn't suffice and contempt for himself for engineering such a spectacular and inevitable failure.

The trouble was that in order to stop stewing on the issue, Snape needed to apportion blame. And right now, he was having trouble doing so. Ordinarily in such situations, he would assign fault to the other person...that was quickest, easiest, if not a little unfair. Yet every time he tried to shift the responsibility onto Folter, he felt worse than ever. The condign condemnation he sought so desperately could not possibly come from reason, only from hurt. He'd learned that judgements based on emotion were poor ones, sometimes fatal, but embittered by betrayal as he was, he couldn't help but search for a way to make it her fault, and hers alone, that he felt so disappointed at her mysterious silence.

Folter did not try to curry favour with him. That was not her way, and had she done so, it would have been an admission of wrongdoing on her part. That would have destroyed any hope for forgiveness from him. She had continued in her duties with her usual steadiness and surety, but Snape saw the lines of strain around her eyes that betrayed her anxiety. She knew that she had hurt him, despite the stoic attempt on his part to present an impassible front. She knew him too well for that to work.

So they'd moved through their routine in a bruised silence, each trying to find their own way around the shackles of their principles, and neither willing to release themselves from what they had made the very foundation of who they were.

He hadn't realised how much he had trusted her. Otherwise, it wouldn't have hurt this much. It was that which made Snape decide that if anything was to blame, it was circumstance. There was little point in making Folter suffer for it. It was wrong, and he knew exacerbating her feelings of guilt would fail to make him feel any better. If anything, the keen awareness of his petulance embarrassed him. Today of all days. Another year still saw him dreadfully stunted in his emotional maturity. To cavil in the same manner he had as a teenager was an appalling crutch that he had to let go of. If anyone deserved that relegation of jejunity, it was Folter.

As if to compound her importance in his life, she had not failed him this evening. He'd known that time was critical, that the minutes it would take for him to get from the school gates into the castle, to Parr's room and then to figure out what the Striker would need to replace what Lupin had magically tagged, were more than they could afford.

So Snape had called her name, the word torn from his mouth by the icy wind that lashed against him, that rattled the gate in its fixtures and brought the stony exhalations of the ageless mountains to wrench the warmth from him. The crack of her Apparition was smothered to a snick.

"Folter, I need your help."

The sky was so choked with inky cloud that he could barely see her in the dark.

"Folter serves the Professor."

"And keeps secrets."

She stiffened at that. Even in the dark, he could see it. Her hair streamed from her head, caught in the furious gusts, but the house-elf's small body was stone, miserable yet resolute.

"I need you to keep another."

It was in that moment he realised that he trusted her still. And because of that trust, he had returned within the quarter hour, a tightly bound bundle in his hands that he lofted up to Parr's window.

With luck, the other occupants would still be in the front portion of the house. The small laneway that ran in a cobbled strip between two blocks of buildings provided discreet entrance and exit from the safe house via the courtyard. There were charms set to prevent unwelcome visitors, but they were a secondary prevention. The neighbourhood was one of reasonable affluence and reserved behaviour: people kept to themselves and bowed to the English tendency of politeness and social expectation. All to the good. Provided Lupin had not laid unknown and more subtle methods of keeping tabs on the Striker, they could leave quietly and unseen. But Snape knew that Lupin was neither as open nor naïve as he often seemed. Occasional flashes of shrewdness from him were not unknown. There were a myriad of ways to keep a metaphorical eye on Parr, even taking her immunity to magic into consideration. To divine which, if any, of those ways still remained hidden would take more time than was available. Plus, if Snape went digging about, he could inadvertently alert the werewolf that someone was trying to get around the safeguards. They would just have to risk it. It would be one of the lesser risks taken this evening.

Parr's silhouette slipped from the open window and through the drop from first storey to courtyard with a lithe and deft certainty of motion. She made a disturbing lack of noise in doing so, but the vibrations from her jump that ran through the ground were echoed ominously in a rippling of awareness, a discordance that marked her presence as surely as her stealth sought to disguise it. It was a contradiction that perplexed Snape. Worse, it made him uneasy. She was the ghost in full view, the assassin whose scream betrayed her intent. How could she possibly hope to avoid detection when everything of her that couldn't be seen was a beacon to those attuned to its frequency?

It had not been like this before. When they had gone to see the apoth for the second time barely a month ago, Parr's control had been near absolute. The only moment that her grip had faltered was when the fat man had admitted his ignorance of where Parr's Handler was being kept. It had taken every scrap of Snape's ability in Legilimency to order her not to lash out at the apoth. Despite her overwhelming rage, she had stayed her hand. Short of Imperius, nothing could have stopped her had she decided to punish, and Snape dreaded to think what she would have done had he tried to place that particular curse on her. He was certain that the only reason she had listened to him that night was because she still retained some degree of restraint, not from any capacity of control on his part...the rational part of her had been stronger. Tonight, that restraint was thinner than a layer of oil on water. The steel barrier Parr hid behind was still there, but spider lines of instability were appearing across the face of it, thread thin, but a fractioning of the façade nonetheless, a fortress that was beginning to rupture from a quake that it had no hope of withstanding.

Ambient light from the other houses lit her enough to show the paleness of her face briefly. Her eyes were turned down to a slender, flat object clutched in the lengthened fingers of her gloved hand. Snape could not see clearly what it was, the light being insufficient to allow a clear identification. A line between the Striker's brows belied a hesitation that was flavoured with disquiet as the walls of her mind juddered for a heartbeat.

"Time passes. We must leave here," she whispered and flowed towards the back gate.

They slid from darkness to gloom, past insipid circles of light from streetlamps and the searching arms of car headlights. The evening was still young, but the cold kept most people indoors, not inclined to linger in the bitter air that promised sleet when warmth, food and sanctuary could be found within their houses. A small park halfway along a road three blocks away, little more than a square of patchy lawn, bare-knuckled plane trees and scratchy hawthorn, formed a brief refuge for them.

Parr's eyes glittered down at him, colourless in the darkness, the hawthorn screening them from detection by any passersby. The fixed stare he had seen from her back inside the safe house was trained unerringly on him once more. In such a state, there would be nothing he could hide from her, and with a weakening mental resolve, her reactions would be unpredictable: a not uncommon situation for him to be in. Both their minds were vulnerable...his by the removal of a defence mechanism that had protected as well as crippled him, and hers by a fatigue born of illness, physical stress and an almost incomprehensible emotional strain.

From what little Snape understood of the bond between Handler and Striker, it was probable that both leaned on each other, working with a mental unison that they became so reliant upon that any destabilisation of that synchronisation could throw the balance off with dreadful consequences. Parr had told him once that he needed to be stronger than her, or she would walk all over him. He now understood how true her words were and realised that he may not be up to the task.

"This is not mine."

She held a wooden box out to him: the object she had held back in the courtyard that had concerned her.

Snape looked at it, not recognising the object proffered to him. He had not seen it amongst the items he had brought her, but it could easily have been hidden at the centre of the bundle. Or perhaps it had been at the safe house all along.

Parr pushed the box closer to him, urgent. She was giving him no option but to take it.

He turned the box over in his hands, the smooth, polished wood unadorned with any clue as to what it contained. It was heavier than he had expected, perhaps an omen of what it held.

"It doesn't belong to me," he responded, running his thumbnail along the groove that demarcated the two halves of the closed box.

Parr huffed a sharp breath from her nose that the falling temperature painted with a fleeting opalescence, studying him from under her lowered brows.

"It does now. And fitting that it becomes yours tonight." There was a pause as her nostrils flared. "For more than one reason, unless my nose fails me."

She nodded once to his questioning look before he opened the box.

The metal was polished to a flawless shine with a central channel that flowed down the centre of the sinuous blade. Under the hilt, two slender, razor-sharp points promised a deadly bite on either side of the dagger's hand length sting.

Snape saw the surprise on Parr's face. How poor must her control be to be so obvious? She covered it quickly, but her reflective eyes searched his. She drew back slightly, speculative. A small shake of her head and her questions were dismissed. For now.

"Keep it close, Dual. You may need it. I have a bad feeling about tonight."

"I don't..."

"We cannot discuss this now. She wanted you to have it and I trust her judgement. I suggest you do the same."

It was more threat than advice, but Snape wisely took it as both. The steel wall thinned and split a little further, shivering into fragments before healing once more into a scarred membrane. In that momentary dissolution, there was a sound, so faint that he almost missed it. A whisper of many voices. Indistinct. Distant. Elusive. He thought he saw Parr shudder and her eyes defocus for a split second, the arced lines of her distorted face taking on an alien, threatening cast, a superimposition of a sinister stranger. Then it was gone. Her eyes sharpened on his face.

"This Unspeakable has enemies?"

"He is an Unspeakable. Of course he has enemies."

"Powerful ones, if he has been unable to hold them off," the Striker noted in a flat, rasping tone. "Why must you find him?"

Her question made him frown. "Surely Lupin would have taught you how crucial Unspeakables are? They're trusted with the most sensitive material the MLE has, and therefore their lives must be a lie to all others in order to protect them and the information they have. For someone to capture an Unspeakable shows incredible skill, or perhaps a plant in the department itself. The other possibility is that the Unspeakable has turned in his allegiance. Either is of great concern to..."

"I know this, Dual," she interrupted harshly. "Why must you find him?" Her eyes were hawk-like in their intensity, the resemblance of a bird of prey enhanced by the bowed planes of her face, pushing her nose into an almost curved beak. A wisp of her silver hair had escaped from under her cowl to lie against her cheek, sharp and cold.

"Because I have been told to."

She considered his answer, mouth pursed in contemplation. "Your response suggests there was no choice in the matter." A calculating, almost suspicious expression tainted her face. "I do not understand this strange arrangement between you and the Headmaster. It concerns me; I do not know what I am walking into."

"What makes you believe that it is the Headmaster that has asked me to do this?"

The look she gave him would have withered stone. "Still open, Dual, no matter how slippery your mind is becoming. Time passes. We will have words on this matter later. Until then I must trust you. Where do we start?"

"At his home."

"Is it close?"

"No. We'll have to Apparate."

Parr hissed her disapproval. "Damn it. Vomiting messes up my tracking, and there are more than enough challenges tonight." Her eyes closed as she took in a deep breath. The fissures in the steel wall diminished to faint lines as she gathered herself, the barrier opaque and impenetrable once more. "Very well." She reached out to take his arm.

"Wait."

Her hand pulled back, eyes widened in mute question.

"Don't you have to..." Snape tipped his head to one side and shrugged slightly.

Parr's expression didn't change, her hand still raised. She gave no indication that she understood what he was talking about.

Snape glanced to one side, uncomfortable at having to clarify his meaning.

"You said it was necessary. Last time. You said you couldn't do your job without it."

Parr exhaled sharply and heavily out of her nose, the body-warmed air pearly in the chilly night air, a bull about to charge. He stood his ground. Defiantly. Foolishly. But defiantly nonetheless.

"'As well expect a carpenter to work without tools,' you said. You would provide a service while hobbled?"

Her eyebrows rose; in surprise or outrage, he couldn't tell. She had hidden herself from him once more, the expert dodging the novice, and the redolence of damp, mouldering earth and leaves drowned out any possible scent he would be able to detect. He no longer had insight to her emotional state now that she had screwed down her resolve. He could only go on what he saw before him. Snape ignored the glint in her eye, the glint that could cut him five different ways.

"You have to be at your best for this to work. Failure cannot be an option tonight. For either of us."

Her voice went as sharp and cold as frostbite. "You presume to tell me my job?"

"No. You presumed to tell me, Striker."

That made her bristle. She was in no mood for his counterargument, and her agitation threatened the repaired bulwark that she hid her thoughts behind. "I tell you what I believe you need to know."

That made his mouth twist. "Just like everyone else."

The smile that split across her face held no humour, no goodwill. It was a hair's breadth from the premonitory grimace of a hound about to bite.

"What is this about, Dual?"

"Did you lie to me before when you said it was necessary?"

Her eyes narrowed to slits.

"Did you lie to make me an addict so that you could get what you want, so that I would beg like an animal for a scrap from your table?"

The rumble could have been from the nearby train line, but Snape knew it was his final warning. Parr took one step closer to him, a black thundercloud ready to strike him down with unstoppable force.

"I don't have time for your morbid angst, Dual, but I will ask you this: what do you believe my primary purpose is?"

"I don't believe that has any relevance to..."

"What...do you believe... my primary purpose is?" she repeated with deadly emphasis.

Snape stared up into her face, unsure of the motive behind her question.

"If memory serves, you find things." The abrupt lowering of her brows forced him to make an addendum. "Your words."

Parr didn't appreciate that much, if the grating sound from her chest was anything to go by.

"My primary purpose is ensuring the safety of my Handler. Everything else is secondary." Her elongated, gloved finger came up to point in his face. "Everything. Now, listen to this carefully. I do not need to do what you want in order to find this man. I've tracked without it before. I am not crippled without it, and I give no less in my services by not holding your mind in mine."

"Then why did you insist upon it the first time?"

"Because I must know what you're thinking. Because I must know what you intend. Because I must know at every moment where you are!"

Another step forward and she would be nose to nose with him. At least, she would if she didn't top Snape by a foot. He refused to back away.

"Then why not do it this time?"

"Because in this moment you are my Handler and damn the inappropriateness of it!" she spat at him, furious. "Your safety is my first and most important responsibility, and to do what you ask... what you demand... is a danger to you that you do not understand!"

"You cannot claim necessity in one instance and irrelevance in another." The anger at her refusal had Snape between its teeth, biting into him with a cruelty that drove his stubbornness. A part of him deep inside cringed in shame at his behaviour, at the desperation that shredded his reason and self-control, at the hunger she had deliberately placed in him for her own ends.

"I cannot give you what you want!" Parr's body shook in her abrupt fury at him.

"What I wanted was irrelevant to you before, Striker. What a fluid set of standards you have that you can change them when it suits you!" Snape hissed accusingly at her.

He may as well have struck her across the face if the bare shock in her expression was to be trusted. It was in that moment that Snape realised that not only was he shamelessly admitting the desperate need he had, but he was cruelly forcing her to explain why she was refusing to satisfy that need. He saw it in her face as the guise of anger and frustration crumbled.

"I cannot do it!"

"Why?"

"Because you frighten me!"

Definitely not the response he had expected. Snape frightened many people. He knew that. Often times, he engineered it so. He'd tried to do so with Parr and failed. Spectacularly. She delighted in pointing out how little he impressed her, how little he could cow her. It seemed to amuse her that she could metaphorically flick him on the ear and brush off the ramifications of that. He could scarcely believe what she had just admitted to.

Parr's hands clenched into fists and hid her eyes from him, the resolve and control she had dredged up from within herself now a tattered ruin, the torn flesh of an animal that had failed miserably in its defiance of an overwhelming force it had stood against because there had been no other option. Just as he had been driven to admit a terrible weakness within him, so he made her do the same.

"You don't know how to let go," she told him quietly. "And it cannot be that way."

Snape wanted to ask why, but to do so would lay bare that he didn't think it was a problem. Rationally, it was a huge problem. He couldn't afford to be what he was becoming. There was too much at stake. Irrationally, he didn't care. He wanted it. He wanted it so badly that even in the face of all the reasons why he shouldn't, he still did. And she knew it.

"Still open, Dual," she said sadly, her hands dropping from her face. "And I let you walk right into it. And for that I cannot atone. But I will not ruin you further. One day there will be someone for you, and I will not ruin you further. Of all the reasons, that should be enough."

Parr lifted her head and finally met his gaze, exhausted in body and spirit but stubborn in her adherence to a certainty of purpose from which nothing could dissuade her.

"There is a greater reason. I sense tonight will be dangerous. Perhaps more so than you or I realise."

He didn't need to ask. She already knew what he was thinking.

"I have a nose for such things," she explained with a faint and finally genuine smile. It was short-lived. "Whilst you are my Handler, I stand between you and Death. Validus quam nex...that is what I have sworn to. It is who I am. You don't know how to let go. If I go down, you will go down, too. And it cannot be that way."

Snape had to admire her implacable determination even as he hated it. A part of him was even grateful that she did not bow to his addiction. A small part, admittedly. She had caused it in the first place, after all.

"Time marches on, Dual, and I know you have questions." A gentle sigh. "They will have to wait. Let's go find your Unspeakable."

She drifted to his side, the fingers of her gloved hand wrapping around his arm. It was a mark of his craving that this touch alone made him feel simultaneously dreadful and vivified. It was fortunate there was the barrier of fabric between them because Snape had no idea what he would do if she touched him without it there.

The house was as he remembered it: well-cared for, tidy, unremarkable, and undisturbed except for the almost artistically overturned table and chair by the lounge room window. Whilst Snape was far from being a slob himself, even he allowed a greater amount of disorganisation to his private surrounds than Beresford did. The furniture was fastidious in its exactitude: everything in its place. In its precise place. Something in the arrangement reeked of falsity, as if the Unspeakable was so adept at disguising who and what he was that even his private life was a sham. For all Snape knew, there were other, hidden rooms about the house, deliberately obscured in order to protect the knowledge and intentions of their inhabitant. Whilst the temptation to search them out was strong, Snape knew that it would only waste time he already had too little of and probably earn him a nasty, potentially mortal, slap across the face. Still, it was a possibility that the Unspeakable had gone to ground, for whatever reason. It was also a possibility, however small, that he had gone to ground right under their noses. That remained for Parr to determine.

The Striker held herself motionless in the centre of the room as if waiting. Snape had no clear idea what she was doing. Her mood clicked into an almost meditative serenity as soon as the waves of nausea from the Apparating had left her. As she bent to empty her guts into the gutter with whatever dignity she could muster, the slithering, hollow whispering returned to his awareness, as if he could hear it through the thinning steel wall between them. Voices that spoke of many things, things that he couldn't understand, faint yet emphatic, so layered that the sounds merged and blended into a soup of susurrant parlance.

When Parr finally moved, Snape could see her disquiet in the way she held her head, in the angles of her fingers as she moved them, splayed, through the still air. She drifted through the house, from hallway to kitchen, through to study and up to the bedroom. Once, inexplicably, she passed back and forth in front of a painting hanging near a cupboard next to the staircase to the upper level of the house. She spent some moments staring at the painting, shaking her head ever so slightly between pauses of decreasing length.

The overturned table and chair she barely looked at. It may as well have been a pattern on the carpet for all it stood out to her. Parr's dismissal of this obvious evidence of misdeed echoed Snape's own suspicion of the validity of it. It was too convenient, too posed, too considered in its placement. What the Striker found so alluring about the painting, Snape didn't know. Perhaps it wasn't the painting at all. Perhaps she was stripping back the facade that was all around them, discarding the disguise as one would peel an onion.

Snape had once asked Parr directly if she could smell magic. She had carefully avoided answering that question, but he was beginning to suspect that she could, in fact, detect magic in some fashion: by scent or some other awareness. It would be a priceless ability. No wonder the MLE had held seevy so tightly to their chests, and little surprise that they would want such superlative trackers to return to them again.

If Parr did manifest such a skill, Dumbledore would surely know of it by now, either through deduction on his part or from Lupin. The werewolf and the Striker would have operated together too often for questions not to arise on the extent of Parr's abilities. That alone raised another question: why would the Headmaster tell Snape to locate the Unspeakable and not Parr? Snape had already made it clear to Dumbledore that he neither knew of Beresford nor had heard his name mentioned in any other instance. That the apoth had been the one to reveal the urgent necessity of finding Beresford was something that Snape thought wise to keep to himself, yet the nagging suspicion that Dumbledore was testing him was starting to scratch away at his thoughts. He'd already been caught once before in involving himself in a matter that Dumbledore deemed none of his business. But why wave the flag in front of him? The Headmaster had a far greater capacity to be covert and secretive than he was currently being. Was this, in reality, a subtle nudge in the direction that the old wizard wanted him to go? All questions that made him nervous.

Snape sniffed as he stared at the painting that Parr had dithered in front of. It was an uninteresting representation of countryside, almost kitsch in its stereotypical placement of rustic houses nestled amongst hills, the spire of the church slicing sharply into the powder blue sky. He squinted at it, trying to find some hidden glyph in it that would explain Parr's attention on it. Perhaps it disguised a room behind it. He reached his hand out to touch the slightly battered wooden frame, its varnish oddly worn along one side.

A sharp growl behind him stayed his hand.

"Don't touch it."

Snape turned his head to find Parr standing in the doorway to the dining room. Her brows were a heavy line over her eyes, lips pressed tightly together in disapproval.

"Why?"

"This place is riddled with traps. Some are relatively harmless but others will kill you. The worst one is on that painting, so unless you want to cop the fist of Death in your teeth, I suggest you leave it alone, Dual."

He pulled his hand away from the painting. "The Unspeakable?"

"He is not here. And has not been so for at least a week."

An unsurprising result, though no less disappointing, and potentially a dead end.

"You have no means to track him?"

Parr's green eyes glinted at him in the light thrown by the lamp in the corner of the dining room – an allocation of space that seemed absurd. Who would this Unspeakable invite to dinner? Who could they possibly allow into their life, even just to share a meal in their home?

"Which man do you refer to?" She loped from the doorway and back into the lounge room. Snape followed in her wake.

Another man? There was no evidence that Beresford shared his house with anyone else, nor any mention from Dumbledore that the man was in any kind of relationship, with family or with a lover.

"What do you know of this other man?"

Parr snorted. "That was to be my question to you." She huffed, her back facing him, finally studying the overturned table and chair by the window. "Something strange is going on here, and I don't like it, Dual. If this is an attempt to test me, I am insulted."

"And if it isn't?"

She considered that for a few moments. "Then someone is testing us both."

"That may be the case."

His comment turned her around, the fabric of her coat swirling around her legs in a black vortex, her eyes wide in outrage. "And you say nothing of this until now?"

The steel wall split to allow her anger to leak out. Snape could almost taste it: bitter like bile and metallic like blood.

"It was nothing but a suspicion before-" He shook his head slightly to try and dislodge the whispering from his ears as if it were water seeping into his skull.

"Yet something more than suspicion now." Parr's face had taken on that hard cast he'd seen a few times that presaged a nasty burst of temper. "What else are you not telling me?"

Her anger started to bleed into him. "Let's not pretend I'm the only one withholding information, Striker. If it's of little consequence to you that the Unspeakable dies, best tell me now so that I can continue the task alone."

That didn't just put the match to the fuse; it razed it to a stump in blast of fire.

"Arrogant shit!" Parr hissed, advancing on him. "You never tire of calling my abilities into question! You may be better at this than Remus, but at least I don't have to cop abuse every five seconds from him." Her form swelled in front of him, black and terrible. "The only one you'll have to blame for the Unspeakable's death is yourself."

"Then you can find him?"

"Of course I can find him!" she roared in his face, teeth bared in such a way that he could see that they had grown into sharp, arcing lines. "But the difference between finding him alive and finding him dead may depend on who's willing to stop playing the mystery game!" The Striker's hands lifted high to form the sign he'd seen once before: the index and middle fingers of both hands overlapping each other in parallel. "But believe me when I say that if I hear even the ghost of a lie, I will leave you behind and damn the consequences. The Unspeakable will not die because you're too craven to trust me. Not if I have any say in it."

She didn't even wait for him to answer, whirling away to return to the centre of the room, one finger pointed emphatically her feet. "Tell me why a man Apparated into this house, a man whose scent is nowhere else in this house, a man who until three nights ago had never been here before yet knew how to step around every measure put in place to keep him away from what the Unspeakable wanted to keep most hidden. He didn't even have to search for it. From here..." Her finger lifted from the floor to the painting in the hallway. "... straight to there."

"You're certain he Apparated in?"

She heard the confusion in Snape's voice. It had the unexpected benefit of derailing her anger. The cracks in the steel wall sealed again, the ebb of whispering voices fading, the tide of sensory input into his awareness pulling away from him. In its absence, he realised how much it had been affecting him. The Striker was becoming dangerously unbalanced, and whatever she was unable to hold onto was leaking into him. Or perhaps she was deliberately siphoning it from herself and into him. She'd done it before.

"It leaves a... smell that I recognise." Parr splayed the fingers of both hands wide and swept them in a circle around her, demarking an area barely enough to encase her. "This is the only place it could've been done. The rest of the house is blocked against it." A shrewd expression crept across her distorted face. "You didn't know this?"

"I was told of the block, but not of the exception."

Snape wondered if Dumbledore knew of it, and if he had, what difference it really would have made.

"What I can't understand is why this anonymous man didn't Apparate out. He left by the front door." The Striker watched Snape very closely, her eyes closed to mere slits, nostrils flared. Assessing his reaction. Cagey. Suspicious. Still unwilling to believe he was also in the dark. He needed her trust for this to work, or the Unspeakable really would be dead from his inadequacy to the task.

"There are several possibilities for that."

"Which are?"

"He was unaware of the limited area of exception to the Apparating block."

A small shake of her head. "Extremely unlikely since he Apparated in at the only spot he could have."

"His magic was blocked by another party after he entered."

Parr considered this option. "A person-specific Nullifier?"

Snape nodded. "Whilst not the only option, certainly the most likely."

The Striker ran a finger over her lower lip, gaze flicking from side to side. "Maybe, but he didn't leave under duress or under stress. He was calm. Deliberate."

"He could have carried something from the space hidden behind the painting that couldn't be Apparated."

"There are such objects?" A mixture of curiosity and faint disbelief tainted Parr's voice, but her earlier anger remained under tight control. For now.

"I've heard it's possible, though I have never encountered such objects personally. The theory for it is sound. The object doesn't even have to be magical or dangerous, merely something acted upon, like an innocuous object turned into a Portkey. It would force the owner, or the thief of it, to be in personal contact with it at all times. Such a Charm would rarely be the only one acting upon the object. Combined with a spell that renders the object immovable, it would prevent theft." Snape shrugged one shoulder slightly. "Whoever this other person is, they must have known how to overcome all manner of security measures."

"A collaborator?" Parr crouched down, the gloved fingers of her hand brushing against the fibres of the carpet, lost in thought.

"Out of character for an Unspeakable, unless you mean a person who extracted information from the man against his will. To be an Unspeakable is to be alone."

"Foolish," the Striker muttered, her fingers still sliding back and forth across the carpet at her feet. "A person cannot be alone and be protected."

Snape frowned at her comment. "Perhaps he felt that his own protection was sufficient."

She barked a humourless laugh at that. "It is a sorry state of affairs when a man has no other eyes to watch his back." She stood smoothly. "What could drive a person to shun company, to deny even a basic friendship? No family to be visited by. No acquaintances that could enter his home. A wizard who doesn't even have a... House-elf under his roof." Parr turned sharply away and brushed past him, stony-faced. "Come."

They headed swiftly away from the house. Snape had little choice but to follow.

There was no hesitation in Parr's footsteps. Whatever it was that she followed past houses and parked cars, through quiet streets and empty public spaces, must have been as bright as fire to her. Once or twice a stranger came into sight, lost in their own concerns and hurrying to escape the scraping chill in the air and the mist that had begun to descend to dampen hair and clothing with a leaden freeze. Parr would bend forward to disguise her notable height, but the other party barely noticed the presence of anyone else.

As each minute passed, Snape was increasingly convinced the Striker would come to a sudden stop, declaring the trail of their quarry lost in Apparition. But the halt, when it came, was not for the reason he had thought it would be.

Parr stood at the end of a street, her head turning from side to side. The road that ran perpendicular was silent and shrouded. To the left it curved away around the wall of a school and off into the night. To the right it marked the boundary to a construction site ringed with a chicken-wire fence. Ragged shreds of plastic fluttered gently like gruesomely welcoming fingers from the spiralled barbed wire, inviting trespassers to shred their flesh on the cold flecks of piercing metal.

The Striker murmured something he couldn't hear, her head swinging from side to side, locked in indecision. Snape drifted closer to her. Something was clearly distressing Parr. He needed neither the scent of her body nor the flavour of her thoughts to know that. He was close enough this time to catch her words.

"A bad feeling, Dual."

The hole in the fence was hidden around the far side of the construction site and barely wide enough for the Striker to fit through. The ground was muddy and difficult to traverse from rain and the incomprehensibly random potholes and ditches dug by the builders. The mist settled in shallow depressions, swirling as they cut through it. The squat, concrete edifice of half-finished tenements loomed in the dark, a shell of featureless, flat planes that would soon shelter its inhabitants in a joyless, uninspiring claustrophobia that they could barely afford.

A sense of dread was starting to leach into Snape. What kind of person could enter the house of an Unspeakable, bypassing all manner of magical protection to secure something of such interest to them, that would then travel to such a place? What here could possibly be of use to them unless...

"Dear God, no!"

The words were barely out of Parr's mouth before she broke into a run, a dark shape that fled away too swiftly for him to follow, swallowed into the night. Stumbling and lurching clumsily across the uneven ground, Snape tried to follow, cursing her under his breath.

The mist marked Parr's trail as it flowed in to fill the gap made by her like a glacial surf of ghostly water. It thinned to nothing as he reached the incomplete building, the gritty smell of damp concrete and powdery cement stronger here. The main entrance to the building yawned wide, the door absent from its setting. Snape hesitated before it, unwilling to go in after her. He wasn't even certain that was where she had gone.

The clicking growl, like the stuttering, guttural utterance of a crow, off to his right pulled him around to face the neatly stacked planks of wood partially covered by a canvas tarpaulin, the tip of his wand marking the source of it like the needle of a compass. He hadn't even realised he'd drawn it from his pocket. It took a moment for his eyes to pick out Parr's silhouette in the gloom.

The Striker kept her eyes fixed on a window up high in the side of the building as he crouched in the shadows beside her, forestalling his curt reprimand for bolting from him.

"Up there." One long finger guided his eyes up. "Do you see him?"

The window was blank; nothing more than a square hole punctured in the concrete.

Snape shook his head. "No."

"They're here. Both of them." Her hand dropped and disappeared into the wide sleeve of her coat. The shining flat of the slender dagger lay crisply against the darkness of her clothing. "And an old friend."

The nasty thread through her voice made a mockery of the word.

"Who?"

Parr's hand tightened on the hilt of the weapon. "A man whose throat I vowed to cut."

Snape stared at her, at the sharp lines of her face and the enlarged, shadowed eyes. "I thought you didn't kill."

The searchlight of her eyes turned on him. "My past actions have already condemned me, Dual. What more could I lose by murdering a murderer?"

Was this where she would prove too strong for him? That likelihood had been hanging above them ever since leaving the safe house. Both of them had known it but they had chosen the danger nonetheless.

"That is not what you're here for," Snape pointed out, feeling the garrotte of her anger wrapping around his insides and cutting deep. "Personal grievances must wait."

Snape couldn't fathom how she could be so angry and so sad at the same time. One emotion fuelled the other until it was nothing but a feedback loop that swelled the bitterness in her.

"Wait for what? An Unspeakable who is already in Death's hand?"

"You know this already?" he asked in dread. Too late.

"I can smell what's left of him."

Far too late.

"For him, yes," she replied to his thought. "And if luck doesn't spit in our face again, perhaps for the other two as well." Her head turned back to the building. "If we are to go in, understand it may be the last thing we ever do."

"If we have failed already, why go in at all?"

Parr did not answer him straight away, but the reason came to him in an echo of her thoughts, scarlet with fear and rotten with dismay.

The Unspeakable was still alive.