Chapter Fifty-Seven—Slipknot

A/N: I would like to put a warning for torture here. If you're squeamish, it may not be wise for you to read, but I wasn't going to tiptoe around the event.

Snape didn't want to know what Parr could have seen that would have distressed her to such a degree and so openly. Her calling in life would have placed her in situations of some terrible corruptions of humanity, but as he stood in silence, watching her carefully as she stood in the doorway to where the Unspeakable was, her back to the room and her hand pressed tightly to her mouth, he wondered what could have exceeded the Striker's expectations of what she would find. It placed enough doubt in his mind that for a brief moment he wondered if he should leave before seeing what had been done.

Her warning before they had entered the building had set him on edge. Common sense told Snape that to go in after a man who was effectively dead would achieve little. If anything, three people would be in danger instead of just one. However, the thought of abandoning the Unspeakable to an agonising death that was any longer than it had already been sat as poorly with him as it did with Parr. Even if he baulked, the Striker would have continued without him, and he wasn't prepared to surrender her safety tonight. Besides, they might be able to flush the perpetrators out.

"You must be silent," she whispered to him. "No noise, no tread, no voice."

"I have done this before," he retorted, offended at the implied doubt of his abilities.

"In the dark on unfamiliar territory?" A delicate snort. "Yes, perhaps you have, at that. Very well." She firmed her grip on her knife and made for the building.

All that Snape recalled of their course from ground floor to fifth was the smell of damp and blood that grew stronger as they ascended. With one hand on the wall of the stairwell and his eyes on Parr's back to guide him, there was little to see. Perhaps he had made a sound loud enough to hear: a scrape of boot on stone or the catch of fabric on concrete, but he was almost certain that he had been as quiet as Parr. Perhaps he'd tripped something: a charm set to alert. Such things were hard to detect until too late. Perhaps it had been nothing more than coincidence.

The harsh, whip-like crack of Apparition ahead of them set a ringing in Snape's ears. The surge of frustration could have been his alone, but he suspected just as much, if not more, came from Parr. She bolted the last few steps and into the room from where the savour of a life ending bloomed.

Snape couldn't separate Parr's abrupt shift from fury to horror from his own leaden sensation of dread. She had turned away from the hanging shadow inside the room, one hand clamped so tightly to her face that her fingers dug deeply into her cheeks. Eyes screwed closed, she fought against the bone-deep survival instinct to flee with a doggedness that was either admirable or absurd.

Perhaps Parr had not been exposed to the level of depravity and viciousness of the amoral that he had. After all, those that he was unwillingly associated with took pride in reaching ever-decreasing levels of compassion and mercy. Some of what Snape had seen defied belief...things that seared straight down to the soul, imprinting themselves on memory and dreams in a horror that continued even after the deed had long ended. What could one more act of brutality do to his already shredded naïveté of what a person was capable of?

He edged his way carefully around Parr and into the stench of an adumbrated nightmare.

His eyes tried to focus on the silhouette and criss-cross of lines before him, but it took several seconds to piece together just exactly what was in front of him.

The smell was worse in here. Much worse. The pungent rot of flesh was a gagging blanket, an unmistakeable augury of mortal putrefaction. Even during his time at St Mungo's, Snape had never encountered anything like it, and the hospital had been the repository of some utterly devastating cases of torture and slaughter amongst innocent and guilty alike.

This was a body hung for a slow and agonising death, its heart kept beating only to prolong the pain, the brain forced into an alertness just sharp enough to comprehend the punishment that was still to come, and dull enough to prevent the struggle against it.

There was a garbled gratitude in Snape's mind that the light in the room was so poor. What he could see was more... much more than enough.

The precision with which the Unspeakable had been dissected was exemplary, and even more horrifying for its clinical approach. It had been done by an experienced hand, by someone who knew very clearly the internal structure of the human body, who knew just how far its components could be displaced without killing the whole.

Delicate threads radiated out from the naked body like the gossamer strands of a spider, tied around blood vessels, viscera and nerves, holding them out of their rightful place. This man had been bled of his insides through punctures in his flesh, tissues that were never meant to be touched by air tweezered out and pinned in a gruesome fan before the victim, blistered and serous, the slime of necrosis coating every membrane. The Unspeakable had been forced to see what had been done to him: a torture that he couldn't retreat from either physically or mentally.

Snape's fingers travelled along a length of thread to a small metal nail buried in the left wall, just near the glassless window. Such anchors were dotted all around the Unspeakable, some in the floor and walls, and many in the ceiling. The body itself was suspended by thicker cords leading up from the shoulders. Treading carefully around the network of threads and suspension of flesh, Snape could see the metal hooks that pierced through the skin, arms and legs held out and away from the body. Meat hung by a butcher. A stringed puppet suspended, motionless in a silent nightmare.

It was as he was circling back around that he saw the glint of glass nearly hidden behind the lattice of bared veins and arteries knitted around it like a cage. He would need light to see it more clearly.

Snape tried to keep the glow from his wand as small as possible, but it could not fail to illuminate far more than he ever wished to see. The glance had been automatic, lasting a fraction of a second, yet it burned itself into memory to last a lifetime.

An incision ran from sternum to pubis, the two wings of flesh held out and riddled with angry, inflamed holes through which the blood vessels looped like strands of sodden wool. Muscle and fascia sliced and pinned. Boiling coils of intestine suspended in a cruel crochet of suffering.

Hissing through his teeth, Snape raised the end of his wand in a futile effort to return the torment to the shadows.

The Unspeakable's head hung forward, the hook through the skin at the back of his neck nearly torn through. His face was puffy and streaked with bile and mucus but unmarked, the torturer's knife leaving that deliberately untouched. Despite the setting, the man's face was unremarkable, the sort that would pass in a crowd unnoticed: plain, symmetrical, ordinary. Nothing that would draw the attention of the casual observer. Whoever had tormented him here in this cold, empty, concrete grave of a building, they wanted the victim to witness every abuse inflicted upon them. It would explain the meticulous explosion that fanned out in an arc around the front of the body. It also indicated a cold logic at work. One might consider taking the next step and removing the victim's eyelids. That way, he could not even have found refuge by closing his eyes. But doing so would have drawn blood and oedema which would have poured into his eyes and blocked his vision, so the torturer had let the victim keep his lids.

Had the man's eyes been open, he would have been looking directly at the vial that sat inside the knitted cage of his own veins. Snape peered closer in order to determine its purpose, trying to breathe shallowly in order to keep the smell out of his nose. It was a simple glass container, neither engraving nor label on it, the pale rose of the liquid inside clear and oddly jarring in its starkly brutal surroundings. What role in this macabre vivisection could it have had?

"He's alive. How could he possibly be alive?"

Parr's voice was ragged with disbelief, muffled by the hand still held to her face, her head turned away as she refused to look again upon the foetid dissolution. The sibilance of siren-like euphony pressed hard against her mental barrier, thinning the wall until it blistered into oddly echoing pockets.

"It won't be for much longer," Snape replied, his mouth twisting from the surge of revulsion in his guts. He stepped back from the body yet not far enough away from the gagging stench.

"Is there nothing we can do?"

He turned his head to one side, Parr's shadow looming in the far corner of his eye.

"What would you do, Striker? He's beyond help. Let him go."

Snape backed away another step and let the glow fade from the end of his wand. Hopelessness and anguish articulated into a raw, questioning thought. He didn't know whether it came from her or himself, but he had to answer it for the both of them.

"Perhaps it would be a mercy, but I do not know if I can do it."

Euthanasia was hard to accept, but in the face of such inevitable death, to withhold it seemed just one more cruelty to force upon a person who had already been through more than a living being could possibly bear.

"Then, I will do it."

Parr condemned herself to the action by accepting it as the final humane deed the Unspeakable would ever experience. She turned to face the wretched remains, her knife clutched tightly in her hand, her features resolute and gaunt: merciful death cloaked in black, the eerie voices that called from her mind the lure into destruction.

The gun-shot bang of Apparition sounded somewhere below them.

Parr's face contorted as she swore and swirled for the door. Snape made to follow her.

"No! You will wait here, Dual." The whites of her eyes gleamed at him, the line of her brows telling him she would brook no argument against her order. "Do whatever it is you need to do to seal this room, but you will remain here!"

And then she was gone, leaving Snape with his own string of epithets to voice.

The only way to completely negate magic from operating in the room would require a Nullifier, and he couldn't cast that alone. He would have to fall back on ways of disabling the most likely offensive tactics, calling up a mishmash of defensive charms and trigger hexes to lie in a wide circle around him. It couldn't stop an intruder from Apparating into the room, but they would face a nasty backlash if they did. Anyone entering through the doorway would find themselves bound and hanging upside-down before they could blink. As a last resort, he could always Apparate out. This was the one time Snape was grateful for Parr's immunity to magic. He could lay the nastiest traps without fear of them touching her when she returned. If she returned.

The fear that thought elicited surprised him, but considering how much of his own survival currently relied on the Striker, he should have expected such a reaction.

Seconds passed in leaden silence with only the whisper of his own breathing to accompany him.

Time stretched into a soundless minute.

Surely there would be something by now, some indication of confrontation between the Striker and the intruder, but the velvet quiet denied that there could possibly be anyone outside of the room.

"Please."

Snape dismissed the voice at first, thinking that his ears were playing a trick on him, a misinterpretation of the rush of blood running through him. Or perhaps a brief crystallisation of the chorus that leaked from the Striker's thoughts.

"Please."

He turned to the source of the voice that still hung in a shredded pattern in the centre of the room.

Beresford's head remained tilted forward, but the ends of his fingers twitched erratically, the muscles and tendons working in spasmodic pulses to pull against the threads that anchored the flesh flayed aside.

"I've told you everything I know. Just let me be. Let me die."

That the man alive at all was incredible. That he could still draw breath and form words, wavering but coherent, was incomprehensible. Snape trod carefully back towards the man, his hesitation as much from fear as repulsion. What strength of will or perversity of fate could have kept this man from dying long ago?

The Unspeakable's head lifted in response to Snape's approach, and he flinched back at the weak circle of light that returned to the end of the upheld wand.

The man's eyes sharpened on Snape's face. "You?" He blinked several times in confusion, his voice struggling through his erratic and hitched breathing. "Unexpected, but perhaps unsurprising, now that I think on it. Where there's one, there's always another lurking nearby. I just didn't think there'd be a third."

The tired, broken tone of his voice strengthened Snape's pity for the man's predicament, the sound ragged and raw as if he had screamed until the vocal cords had blistered and split.

"A third what?"

Beresford's head wobbled, a tinge of disorientation passing over his features momentarily, like a person just woken from a very heavy sleep. "Death Eater. Cleared by the Wizengamot, perhaps. But once a Death Eater, always a Death Eater, they say." He paused. "But they're not always right. Are they?"

Something odd was occurring here. This man was too lucid, too calm for someone nearing his end, for someone whose innards had been dragged out of him, for someone who was rotting from the inside out, the heat of his body draining away into the chill winter night. The manner in which he spoke, the apparent clarity of his thoughts, clashed markedly with his physical condition.

The Unspeakable nodded slightly, but whether it was in response to Snape's realisation was hard to determine.

"Albus said you could be trusted, but I wasn't sure." He gave a light snort at that admittance. "Maybe I'm still not sure, but I trust Albus. On this matter, at least. You're lucky that I did. Some wanted you... removed permanently, regardless of the Wizengamot's findings. I've had to mislead some of my closest colleagues to keep you alive. If they knew, they'd condemn me as a traitor. In many ways I am, but I am not the one they should be looking for."

"Another Unspeakable?"

"Yes, but I don't know who. I only had a suspicion before, but now I'm almost certain, else I wouldn't be here. You must tell Albus."

It might explain how Beresford had been caught: his whereabouts and his routine known by a colleague, and the information delivered to the right ear at the right time. He was an Unspeakable. That alone would make him a tough mark. Chosen carefully and trained thoroughly, of all the MLE's operators, the Unspeakables would be the most adept in keeping their knowledge hidden, the hardest to catch, the deadliest to handle. It was said that their will was iron, that they couldn't be persuaded or broken. Snape had even heard the theory that Unspeakables were all Occlumens, but that could easily have been a rumour carefully planted by the MLE to bolster the reputations of their most secret and opaque operators. That could account for the appalling treatment of this man. In an attempt to break him mentally, the perpetrator had chosen to break him physically first.

"Who did this to you?"

"Mariusz Brachoveitch."

"Why?"

"He wanted to know where the seevy are," Beresford replied, as if it had been the most obvious thing in the world. "All of them."

The Unspeakable flinched oddly, as if struck by a goad across his back.

"Did you tell him where they are?"

"No."

Again, that odd flinch, and Beresford's face twisted.

"The pain?"

The Unspeakable shook his head slightly and looked mildly surprised at the question. "No. There's no pain, but it will come soon. I couldn't last this long under torture if I felt pain. He kept me dosed against it. Said that unless I answered his questions, he'd let me feel what he was doing. Let it happen once, 'to give me a taste', he said. Excruciating doesn't come close to describing it. He had me wanting to beg for death even then, and that was at the start. No, he needed to be sure I wouldn't lie to him through desperation. Pain only works so far in getting the truth."

The man's head dipped. Snape dropped his own gaze to where Beresford was looking: the glass container buried like a transparent heart in the net of veins in front of his chest.

"A painkiller?"

"A poison. So I was told. Kiss of Leinth, he called it. Said he'd let me have it if I told him what he wanted to know."

Snape looked at the vial. The colour was right, but it could be just pigment in water. He wouldn't put it past Brachoveitch.

"A lie, perhaps? To keep you co-operative?"

Beresford gave a humourless chuckle and then choked out a cough a couple of times, the movement making his body sway in its vicious cradle. "I saw him use it on a pigeon. It works. Much crueller that way, to know I'm inches from a quick death yet unable to reach it." His fingers curled and pulled against the threads woven into them.

"Why would he believe that you know where the seevy are?"

Beresford stared at him with eyes that were beginning to cloud over with a pearly white, his expression inscrutable.

"Many people go missing. Far more than the public would ever suspect. Most of the time, we discover the reasons why people disappear, even if we do not make that information known, but some elude even the best of us. The MLE wants seevy back, and they will do whatever it takes to achieve that goal. They think that seevy will help them find these people, but they don't realise that seevy are the reason they disappear in the first place."

"Murder?" The notion contradicted everything that Parr had ever told him about her kind, and the shake of Beresford's head also dispelled the idea.

"No. We don't believe so." He hissed in a breath. "What we have learned suggests that the seevy choose these people carefully. Whatever the common element is, we do not know, but it's important enough for seevy to walk right into our world and risk discovery of their infiltration." There was a pause as the man squeezed one eye closed, the muscles of his face drawing up. "They must have help. It would be impossible for them to be amongst us without it. And we must... know the reason why."

Beresford attempted to focus on Snape's face, but he was plainly having trouble doing so, his head wavering back and forth as if to locate him, the milkiness that was beginning to steal across his eyes occluding his sight. The pain's approach, or perhaps it was the man's body giving up, that his mental focus was finally dissolving as his tissues suppurated and wept poison into his bloodstream.

There was a question that Snape had to ask, one that he needed to get an answer to before this man slipped into death.

"The Parr seevy: the one Fenrir Greyback has. You know where she is?"

"Yes. I've known all along."

"Where?

"I always know where Greyback is. Always. I always have to know."

"Where is she?"

Beresford was confused by the question, or he had failed to hear it. He seemed to be surrendering at last to his dire predicament. Dark trails began to rain from him as his veins split and perforated, dropping splatters of thick blood on to the concrete floor.

Where the hell was the Striker? Snape needed her here. Now! Before this man died and took his secrets with him. If everything Snape had experienced was indicative of her abilities, she could pull from his mind where her Handler was, regardless of the impropriety of it or the ingrained adherence to the seevy tradition and boundaries that she claimed to honour. He cursed his inability to draw her back without calling out, concerned that such an action would alert the intruder below to her presence. Perhaps he could try Legilimency on the Unspeakable, but the futility of the attempt was apparent almost immediately. The dissolution of Beresford's mind as he slipped towards the precipice of death made it impossible. Images and sounds fractured and leaked into a nonsensical slurry.

The man began to ramble, his eyes defocused and sweeping back and forth, unable to pinpoint anything around him.

"I have to tell Greyback when they're too close, remember? That's what I have to do... very important. Mustn't find him."

"Who mustn't find him?" Snape stepped as close as he could to the Unspeakable, his mouth close to the man's ear to whisper in his urgency, seeking to be heard by the dying man alone.

A hiss escaped from the Beresford's mouth, and his body shifted, swaying in the air as his muscles began to tighten into a rigour.

"The Aurors. They mustn't find him... or they'll ruin everything. Took years. Took us years. They mustn't ruin it. Years. I always tell him... when they're too close."

The Unspeakable was deliberately working against the Aurors? Why?

"What would happen if they found Greyback?"

Beresford twisted, his arms pulling at their threads until they cut through dying tissue like wire. Snape would have to get his answers quickly.

"What would happen if they found Greyback?" he insisted.

"We'd lose them all... we worked so hard. We thought they were different... thought they'd want to be allayed with us, but we found they were already here. Years. For years they'd been amongst us and we didn't know why. We had to know why. Too dangerous... not to know why." His breath was becoming ragged. Deep down in his chest, a rattling whistle. At the corner of his mouth, a dark foam. "They have allies... amongst our own people... cannot be trusted. Been watching... for years. You cannot know... too well hidden... we have to know why. They will ruin everything... take what's ours."

Snape had no choice. He couldn't wait for Parr to finish running about in the dark trying to find whomever it was that had Apparated. He would have to call for her.

"Striker!"

The Unspeakable's head snapped up at the word. Beresford wrenched his right arm from its tethers, the opened flesh and macerated blood vessels unable to prevent him from making this last effort. Ruined fingers clutched at the front of Snape's clothing, drawing him closer into that foul cloud of approaching death.

"The Parr seevy... the one Albus has? Do not trust her! She's looking for something... at the school. Bargained for our protection. That is why we keep her Handler from her. We must know what she is looking for! She is more dangerous than you know." The man's claw hand shook Snape roughly. "Do not trust her!" His fevered and clouded gaze flicked past Snape's head.

"And why would that be, Unspeakable?" came a voice from the doorway.

Snape turned to find Parr's towering figure advancing on them, teeth bared and knife held high. The skin of defensive magic that he had laid to entrap warped in its frustrated attempt to prevent her approach, the membrane turned permeable with a bluish silver shimmer as she slipped effortlessly through it. The stony fury on the Striker's face turned to shock. "No!"

The crack of glass pulled Snape's head back to the Unspeakable: dead, the shattered glass vial piercing his mouth and tongue, torn desperately from its vascular prison and crushed between his teeth. Kiss of Leinth was merciful and quick, taking life in barely a heartbeat. The hand that had clutched at Snape's coat barely a second before now slipped from Beresford's mouth to swing heavily by his hip.

The roar from Parr was deafening. "He knew! He was the one who knew!" She lunged at the corpse, her weaponless hand outstretched to the dead man's mouth to tear the remnants of the vial away.

Reflex caused Snape to grab her wrist and deflect her hand away from the glass shards buried in lifeless flesh.

"No! You touch that with even the smallest cut on your fingers and you will join him in death, Striker! He's beyond us now."

Parr pulled her wrist harshly out of his grip, and for a brief moment, Snape saw in her eyes the will to swat him aside and damn the consequences. With her clenched fist raised high, she could crack his skull with one blow in a hammer-strike of fury. As her arm came down, Snape felt the frost-bitten grip of oblivion immobilise him and resigned himself to joining Beresford in whatever lay past the last breath he would ever take.

But Parr's arm swept past his skull, pulling her around and away from him to shriek in her defeat, a blast of agonised resonance that shook the walls and split deep down into his head, a dragon's scream of sound and mind that vented the cruel violence she had come so close to unleashing on him. Even his hands to his ears failed to lessen the sonic blast of an animal lost to the slaughter of failure. Nothing he had ever heard had come close to this.

Then silence, more profound than any quiet gone before, in utter contrast with what the Striker had released. Even the voices in her mind had been stilled.

Parr's crouched form slumped, and a keening sound cut through the shock that Snape's ears had gone into, the high-pitched feedback blending with the Striker's wail in an eerie harmonic.

Before he knew it, the back of her coat was gripped in his hand and the squeezing vortex of Apparition swallowed them both.

Snape hadn't known what destination he had set, the galvanising aftermath of shock drawing him along like an insensate hostage to the survival instinct. It was only as Parr fell to her knees, the clench of uncontrollable nausea crushing her in its grip, that he realised he could have killed them both. His desire to see them both gone from that wretched site of torture was strong enough to overcome the chance of Splinching, but it could have landed them anywhere. Or worse: nowhere, condemning them to a purgatory from which they would never be saved. To Apparate without clear destination was dangerous in the extreme, but all Snape had thought of was escape.

Parr's shriek would have been heard for miles around, and who knew what damnation would have descended upon them to be found right next to a flayed and brutalised corpse? There would be no pause to determine the veracity of a guilty pronouncement. Both of them would have been swiftly and unjustly condemned as the perpetrators of a dreadful crime, perhaps even struck down where they stood.

The disorientation from the Apparition and the gut-churning aftermath of their discovery threw Snape into an acidic confusion. All he could see was a dappled pattern of light and dark around him, blurry and indistinct. Then the lenses of his eyes snapped back into control.

He had brought them back to Hogwarts, a few feet from the gates that marked the boundary to the one place that could shelter them both more securely than any fortress.

"Get up, Striker. Save your vomiting for later."

His hand still knotted in the fabric of her coat, Snape hauled Parr off her knees and spun her to face him as she wiped the worst of the bile away with her sleeve.

"Who was it that Apparated in?"

Parr raised her eyes to meet his, her brow furrowed in confusion, the disorientation of Apparition and the idiosyncratic sickness it brought in her making her slow to comprehend his words.

"At the building, did you find who Apparated in?" he repeated urgently. If either of them had been seen, who knew what unholy mess would result from it? An Auror witness would see them both into Azkaban, and even Dumbledore's word would fail to exonerate them. If what Beresford had said was true, it had only been his word that had stayed the retributive hand of his colleagues in the MLE. Now that he was dead, his word would mean nothing.

"No-one," Parr croaked. "Whomever it was Apparated out, not in. They were there all along." She pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead, trying to dispel the lurching dizziness locked in her skull. A wave of faint sound drifted across the link between the two of them, like vibration along a wire. "It was the man who had been in the Unspeakable's house."

"Not Brachoveitch?"

Parr shook her head, her hair falling forwards in tangled strands. "No. That bastard was the one who Apparated out just before we caught him. This other man was waiting three floors down."

"And you have no idea why he was there?"

The Striker sighed heavily. "No, and I have no way of telling whether he and Brachoveitch were allied. Both had been in that room, but at the same time?" Parr shrugged, clearly at a loss. She buried her face in her hands, its bowed and distorted planes shielded. "Another dead body. My luck has been cursed beyond all hope. If I cannot even fulfil the most basic duty entrusted to me, what use am I any longer?" Her long fingers slipped down her face, allowing her to see where they stood.

"You brought us here?" Disbelief and fear widened her eyes and tensed her body. "You have to take me back to the safe house! If Remus finds me gone, my sanctuary is at risk. He must never know that I left!" Her hand clutched the front of his coat, the wild look back in her eyes. "You must take me back. Now!"

"You said you were sidestepping the rules, not breaking them," Snape hissed back at her.

"You want me to drop you right in the middle of the shit-fight that'll blow up if I'm found out?!" she retorted acidly. Her hand slashed through the air in denial as the subconscious chorale began to swell. "This is not a discussion, Dual. Save your acrimony until later! My time is running out here and you must be as far away from me as possible."

Snape brought them two streets away from the safe house. Parr's desperation to get back before her absence was discovered was great enough to stall her nausea. Her knees buckled briefly as her body reflexively caved into the effects of Apparating, but the harsh epithet ground out from between clenched teeth was the last he heard from the Striker before she bolted into the shadows with nary a glance behind her, the silken strip of indistinct voices in his head trailing away into silence.

Parr was able to maintain a good sense of time, despite the dire situations she could often find herself in. It was mercilessly trained into her at an early age by her aunt, and no matter how hard she'd tried to wriggle out of such temporal discipline, the relentless indoctrination continued until her Trainer had been satisfied that the Striker could determine the time accurately to within a ten minute margin.

As with a great deal of her training, Parr hadn't realised how valuable such ability was until she was actually Tracking. Her job involved far more waiting than it ever did action. Sometimes, days could pass in surveillance and concealment, but Parr could never allow herself to be ignorant of the hour.

Sanctuary within Hogwarts didn't allow the more modern timepieces to work, but she kept an old fob watch amongst her possessions. It was more for the comforting sound of the turning mechanisms and the lustre of its metal that she favoured it, her internal clock proving to be more reliable in the past than the watch. However, bearing the burden of her Handler's failing health and the bone-splintering sickness that Apparition threw her into, Parr had begun to doubt that her temporal sense could remain unaffected. The watch sat deep in one of the coat pockets in order to allay her fears.

Yet now she knew with unswerving certainty that she had shaved too close to the deadline, could feel it in sinew and blood as if her entire body was a timepiece of its own. If Remus found her room empty, even his lenient nature could not excuse her actions, but she had deemed it worth the risk. A cry slipped from her, a blend of anger and grief at her failure as she turned into the back alley behind the safe house. She'd suspected that there was someone within the MLE who knew where her Handler was. She'd lost count of the number of times she and Remus had gotten close to discovering where Caroli lay, dying inch by inch, only to miss their mark by mere hours. The coincidences were too great to ignore. Someone must have been tipping Greyback off, someone who knew Parr's movements. It had led her to become far more secretive with Remus, reluctant to voice her suspicions and her theories lest he unwittingly pass them on to the informer. Remus knew she was holding back. Parr had seen the tightening around his eyes when she failed to include him in her thoughts. She didn't like doing that to him. He'd stood on her side more times than that of the MLE, his own situation giving him a measure of sympathy and support toward her predicament, and whilst she never lied to him, the Striker bent the truth until it knotted itself into a riddle that Remus could never even see to know it needed to be unpicked. She may as well have slapped him in the face for all the gratitude she showed him.

She paused on shaking legs to sneak a look through the cracked back gate. Her room remained in darkness, the window still open to admit the night air that chilled her trembling fingers. No true sound except for the whisper of distant traffic and the desiccated rustle of fallen, withered leaves that merged with the calling voices in her mind. Parr slipped through the gate and scuttled up the back wall of the house towards the open window, inwardly cursing at the sound her boots made against the brickwork. Her Trainer would have punished her harshly for that... had she still been alive. The familiar grief at her aunt's death rose in her throat to try and strangle her, but Parr crushed it back down. Deal with one disaster at a time...anything more would threaten to drown her. Her thoughts raced forward, calculating the best ways to hide her infraction, her mental state so scrambled that she failed to notice the figure waiting for her in the dark until he flicked the lights on, blinding her momentarily and freezing her in place, one foot on the carpet and both hands clutched on the wooden lintel above her head.

"Well, well, well. What have we here?"