Chapter 2: Crossing Card

Twisted uncomfortably in the tight space, trying to stay focused on Granger's face, he held himself perfectly still. The effort, the ache of his back and the pounding of his heart kept him focused.

Anything, anything to distract himself from the gnawing unease of listening to a Muggle fortune-teller read his soul.

The divinatory words washed over Snape. Whisper-soft and seductive, the lure of the images she wove tugged hard at a part of him that he had struggled for decades to eradicate. Promises of hope and wholeness beckoned, despite his conviction that they were not meant for him. By the look of her, he was not entirely sure that such things were meant for Granger, either.

Fool. I am a Fool.

The ache in the centre of his body was like a burning cinder. He had tamped it down for so long...he refused to allow it to ignite now. Snape could feel it, though, pushing its way through the vessels of his body, leaving a gleaming trail like fire under his skin. The heat of it burned, taunting him with the promise of purification and release. Just as his body began to shake from the effort of damping the growing warmth, the voice of the fortune-teller wafted towards him like a wisp of smoke.

"You're not invisible, you know," she muttered, eyes fixed on the cards in front of her.

Snape took a sharp breath. The urge to flee gripped him like an icy fist. He could Disapparate. He could Disillusion himself and slip from the room. He didn't need this...didn't need to get mixed up with whatever Granger had got herself into. Those ridiculous Tarot cards were wielded by a Muggle. They meant nothing to him; neither did Granger. Snape glared at the fortune-teller from behind the veil of shadow and dust, as if he could will her to withdraw from him, to withdraw her demand.

"Stop fleeing from the shadow. You must embrace it... and then step out from the dark." From the slight coaxing in her tone, it sounded like an invitation. For a man whose world had been perpetually shielded from the light, it felt like a challenge.

Or what? he thought defiantly, even as he cursed the impulse that led him to drop his gaze and kept him rooted in place like an errant ten-year-old. Even stronger yet was a conviction so familiar that he no longer questioned it...he belonged to the shadows and they owned him.

"You must come out from the dark," she spoke again. This time the command in her voice was potent, stirred by some foreign power.

I will not, he thought, and the wave of sorrow that engulfed him shook him with its intensity.

A radiant edge of light swept the corner of his eye. He turned his face from it. He always had; save for those moments long ago, preserved in memory like brittle pages in an ancient volume. Such fragile remembrance, he knew, must be shielded from the sun.

But the tendrils of light approached him still, wrapping long strands around him, coaxing, encouraging. He shook his head, tried in vain to shake free. He scowled; it was no use. And if he was to be caught, he would meet his challenger head-on.

Gathering his cloak around himself, Snape assumed his most intimidating stance and lifted his head, prepared to confront the fortune-teller's gaze.

But instead of hard, discerning eyes fixed on him...challenging him...he found only two women huddled at a creaky wooden table, by all appearances, oblivious to his presence. Slumped in her chair, Granger's limp hair hung forward, mimicking the dejected angle of her head and obscuring her face from his view. Snape blinked, disoriented. Before he could gather his thoughts again, the old woman swept her arm in a wide arc, as if she could encircle the room with the fluttering fabric of her scarves.

As the Muggle woman's hand passed over them, the Tarot cards...still laid out in their tale of innocence lost and hopes forsaken...took on an otherworldly glow. Not, Snape realised, the sickly colour put off by the Darkest potions, but of an inner purity contained in the images. Each card was bound one to another with gossamer threads; the figures within no longer static in their cages of fibre and pigment. The radiance lit the gloomy room and lent an ethereal tone to the mundane space.

Snape glanced sharply at Granger. Her sickly pallor looked even starker in the reflected light of the cards. He could see now how deeply shadowed her eyes were and how the lines of her face appeared to be etched in stone. Her eyelashes cast long shadows on her gaunt cheeks. He felt an unwilling ache in his gut as he looked at her.

"I do not carry a wand," the older woman's voice distracted him from the sensation and the unwelcome questions it aroused. "But I sense your magic... and I have the ability to..." She passed her hand over the array of cards at the centre of the table, "...nudge it a bit, here and there." As she spoke, Snape felt a surge of energy erupt from his solar plexus, as if the wind had been simultaneously knocked out of him and pumped into him. He heard Granger draw breath sharply as she reached back to rub the base of her spine, her brow furrowed with discomfort.

"What are you doing to my magic?" The edge to her voice was back, splintery and sharp. Had he been in a position to speak, he thought, his tone would have matched hers.

"Weaving."

Indeed, the tendrils of light and shadow which had been swirling around the cards were joined by a radiant nimbus emitting from the witch, interlocking and entwining with the fibres. It was as if the cards had come alive, their life-force radiating from them...searching and finding what they sought. Snape felt the pulling sensation again and realised that a shimmering nimbus was emanating from him as well, tugging and twisting inside of him as the fortune-teller wove it into the tangle of light over the table. Startled, afraid of being uncovered in his dusty hiding spot, he tried to pull away, to bury himself within the shadows. But neither the witch nor the Muggle woman had noticed the presence of the extra beam, focussed as they were on the fortune-teller's adept hands lacing together the wisps of light.

"You have been fighting for far too long," the older woman murmured with a shake of her head. And while it was clear to him now that she was speaking to Granger, he stiffened in recognition at her words. The fortune-teller gestured again to the array of cards. "So much conflict... should have ended... would have ended for you had it not left you in pieces." Granger took a rasping breath, and Snape saw her draw her shoulders forward and shake her head from side-to-side, as if she could dislodge the notion by physically ejecting it from her mind.

"Too much fire," continued the fortune-teller as she reverently touched three cards in tandem, each bearing flaming wands glowing with malevolent heat. "Traps you in an endless circle... you are convinced that you must find your way out alone." The older woman paused, and the curve of her back and angle of her shoulder as she leaned towards the trembling woman forcibly reminded Snape of a mother's embrace. He watched as the fortune-teller furrowed her brow, finally nodding, focussing on a card in the centre of the spread.

"He is here," muttered the old woman, gesturing to the card. Granger looked up sharply, alarmed, and Snape wondered again what had so flattened the woman who had once brazenly led Dolores Umbridge into the Forbidden Forest.

"There is nobody," Granger said, the edge in her voice almost hiding the melancholy beneath it.

Snape nodded his unconscious agreement. There is nobody...

"There is," said the old woman. "You cannot repair this alone."

"I can't find a way to repair this at all. I've already been to every major library on this side of the world, and half those on the other," Granger grumbled. The fortune-teller let out a bark-like laugh, and Snape grimaced, aware that he, too, had long ago sought resolution to Dark dilemmas within his books.

"Your books and intellect are useless to you in this endeavour. Leave them." The older woman appeared to be winding and tucking the remaining strands into a loose knot before lifting her gaze to meet Granger's sullen expression. "Leave them," the old woman repeated, "there are other tools that you must acquire for this journey."

"Are you going to give me the tools then, or are you going to carry on acting mysterious?" snapped Granger.

"I told you already," the card-reader continued, "he is already here." She lowered her hand to stroke one of the brightly coloured cards. Granger looked suspiciously at the image in question and snorted dismissively.

"What is that supposed to mean?" she asked as she rose to her feet. "I knew this was a waste of time!" Snape stiffened and shrank further yet into the shadows as he watched her turn to stalk away. "They told me that you would know," she sneered. "They said that you would be able to look at me and look at my cards and tell me what to do...help me figure out why this is still happening to me." Granger stopped short, and Snape recalled that bravado only took one so far.

"What is happening to you?" the old woman asked, her hands still stroking the card. Snape's eyes narrowed again as he saw the fortune-teller sweep her hand across the table, as if gathering together the disparate threads that were now woven into a most unusual fabric. Granger gasped, and Snape felt a pull and then release as the radiance dimmed.

"What do you mean, what is happening to me? Can't you see it?" Granger's face was a mask of rage and pain.

"I can see," the old woman replied, "I am not, however, convinced that you do."

"It's ripping me apart... and it's going to kill me." Her voice shook and she turned to leave. "And there is nothing that I can do to stop it..."

It was only when Granger moved from the reflected glow of the cards towards the dimly lit entry that Snape saw it again. The Shadow, slick and dark, lurking under her skin, seeping from her pores like poison. Where she moved, the Shadow followed, blotting out the reflected light from the cards, throwing a sickly grey cast over the air around her.

It was like a punch to the gut.

Damn, damn, damn...

He moved stealthily and as swiftly as he ever had during his tenure at Hogwarts. Releasing himself from the dimness and dust of his hiding place, he slipped out of the shadows to stand, at last, in the fading light of the room.

***

Hermione froze.

No, no, no... Impossible. That's impossible.

Hot blood pounded in her ears, and every cell in her body howled with the demand to recoil.

Get the hell out of here. Now! Outoutout...

She looked away from the spectre that took the form of, Snape, of all cursed apparitions, and swiftly surveyed the small room, wondering how quickly she could reach the door. No matter the sort of creature, she thought frantically, she had to get away from him. All her energy was spent warding off the encroaching Darkness inside herself...whatever Darkness this being carried would burn through her fragile reserve.

There. She could reach the door and get out if she could get past him. A last glance in his direction sent a shudder through her.

Oh, Merlin, that really looks like Snape.

Snape. It couldn't be Snape. Snape was dead...she had watched him die on that terrifying night a decade ago. Lest she forget, she had her nightmares to remind her.

Maybe this is a nightmare... I'll wake up and I won't have to worry about how in Hades Snape got his miserable self back across the Veil... It's got to be a nightmare; it's not Snape...

"You're dead," Hermione announced, as if her pronouncement could make it so. "You... are dead. And I am not standing in a Muggle fortune-teller's shop of all godforsaken places, with you."

She paused, slipped her wand silently down from her sleeve and whispered, "Riddikulus!" The piercing crack split the room and she flinched. Shadowed in the faint light of the room, Snape didn't move. He was still standing, still wrapped in black, still piercing her with those cold eyes. She caught her breath and quickly reversed her course.

Oh, Circe, I'm dead... it's over and I'm dead and I'm here... and Snape is here, and...

"That's it, I'm dead and I'm going to be stuck in this dreadful room forever with..." A torrent of words burst from her and she felt the panic rising again. If she wasn't already dead, she thought, these swings of emotion that kept swamping her might finish the job.

"Despite your undoubtedly fervent wish, Miss Granger," Snape interrupted, his words halfway between a whisper and a hiss, "I am not...nor have I ever been...dead." He moved towards her smoothly, seeming to mark the space between them as he tracked her retreat. She felt like prey, stalked by an expert hunter, his eyes watching. What was he...?

"No!" She wrenched her eyes away from his penetrating gaze and pushed past him, fury and fear breaking through her paralysis until she had put the rickety table between them.

"How dare you?" she hissed, her eyes narrowed as she glared at him.

She stood there, pounding heart gradually slowing...reminding her that she was, indeed, still alive. Snape waited, preternaturally still, and Hermione thought fleetingly of how different this was than the menacing stance that he used to don when he was her professor. She wondered how he might have carried himself while standing in the company of Death Eaters, straddling the line between exposure and survival.

Finally, he bowed his head slightly and raised his hands in what she thought was a barely passable imitation of surrender.

"Indeed. Miss Granger, I believe that I may have... overstepped." She continued to glower, watching him from beneath hooded eyes. His retreat fuelled her again, filling her with righteous anger that she knew would leave her wasted and empty once its deceptive power fled.

"Overstepped," she echoed. "Yes, you might say that you overstepped when you tried to enter my mind without permission..." She smiled darkly at his almost imperceptible flinch. "Which is odd, actually," she continued, a brutal edge to her voice, "considering that my condition should be painfully obvious to one such as... yourself."

"Your condition?" he repeated.

"Don't play dumb with me, Snape," Hermione snapped, struggling to hold on to the vigour that was already draining from her before it left her exhausted and despondent again. "You would have to be blind or an idiot not to see what's happening to me." She stopped short, one hand reflexively pressing against the side of her head in response to an all-too-familiar pain.

"It's obvious what is happening to you, Granger," Snape replied tersely. "What's not is how it happened and what in the name of Merlin you thought a Muggle fortune-teller could do to help you stop it."

They turned together to look at the old woman whose presence they had both momentarily forgotten.

"You wizards think that you are the only creatures to understand magic," said the fortune-teller with a small smile. It occurred to Hermione, foggily, that the woman had seemed not the least bit surprised when Snape had emerged from the shadows. "My people have been studying the elements since long before wizards walked the earth and started making rules for everybody who was different from them."

Hermione met the Muggle woman's satisfied expression blankly. The blinding headache that plagued her now on a nightly basis was already beginning to build, and she had barely enough energy to push past its foggy residue.

Snape, Hermione thought distractedly, had the look of a wizard eyeing a particularly volatile potion. When he spoke, his voice was laced with restrained power, and she wondered if the fortune-teller would have the wisdom to be afraid of this man.

"What elements do you mean?"

"You know the elemental process that I refer to, wizard," she muttered impatiently. "You sensed it. You followed it." She looked up and Hermione saw him blanch under her resolute stare. "You are as familiar with soul magic as I am..." The older woman paused. "...and as she is."

Soul magic... so that's why they sent me here. How does she know about soul magic?

"Soul magic," Snape whispered. His face was deathly pale, and Hermione thought, as she watched him struggle to control his reaction that he must be rather out of practice spying, as this degree of subterfuge practiced during wartime would have led him to an early grave.

The pressure in her head was building, and she knew that she wouldn't be able to carry on much longer.

Decide, Hermione. Tell him what he's missed out on all these years, or get out of here before you decorate the floor with your lunch. The anger was building again, colliding with the ever-present grief and helplessness. Why should he be innocent of the knowledge of what they had lost and what was yet to come?

"You recognise the signs." It was a statement rather than a question.

"I do," he paused.

"Of course you do," she snapped. "The poison that is eating me alive belonged to an old friend of yours." Now that she had opened the door, it was all she could do to discipline her words to come out one at a time.

"An old friend of mine?" He sounded startled.

"Your precious Dark Lord and his Horcruxes, Snape." Her voice was rising rapidly, but she couldn't bring herself to care. "Didn't you wonder what we were doing all those months in hiding? Camping?" She shuddered. "We hunted them; we had to destroy them before Harry could finish him off," she continued. "But nobody warned us that they bit back." Her voice was drenched with all the venom that she could not purge from her body.

"Horcruxes?" His voice was rough, the surprise on his face translated to sound.

"Yes, Horcruxes, Snape. Objects that housed fragmented parts of Lord Voldemort's cursed soul. That diary that nearly killed Ginny, the ring that made Dumbledore's arm black... Nagini, that horrible snake." His gasp stopped her tirade briefly, but the look of shock and disgust re-fuelled her desperate anger.

"Didn't you know that, Snape? Didn't you know that pieces of your precious Master were lying in wait to destroy anybody they touched? Did you know that the headmaster..." she sneered, "pardon me, Headmaster Dumbledore...couldn't be bothered to tell us what we were risking when we followed his directions and destroyed them?"

"My Master? Poisoned Horcruxes? What are you on about, Granger? What happened to those who came into contact with those... those Horcruxes?" Snape sounded unnerved, but it was the mounting alarm in his voice that grabbed her attention.

Oh, Merlin...

The panic in his tone, even camouflaged by irritation, sent her heart racing, as if it had solved a puzzle that her intellect had not yet unravelled. Somewhere in the back of her mind, understanding belatedly dawned that Gryffindors might not have been the only casualties of the war on Voldemort's Horcruxes. Her heart sped up even more at the thought, and she had to force herself to slow down long enough to look more closely at the man who, until moments before, she had believed dead.

He was thin, the severe cut of his cloak emphasizing the angles of his lean frame, black cloth framing the strained expression on his face. His eyes were as dark and penetrating as she remembered from her school days, though at the time she hadn't paid attention to the sensuous sweep of his eyelashes or the proud line of his jaw. A swathe of sooty hair shielded his neck from view, but she knew that there had to be some sort of mark on that pale skin from Nagini's vicious bite.

It hit her with the strength of a tidal wave.

Nagini. Oh, Circe... Nagini bit him, too.

It felt like all the air had been forcibly driven from her lungs. Dizzy, blindly groping for purchase, Hermione sank into the nearest chair and dropped her head between her knees until the room stopped spinning. She could feel him hovering nearby and wondered distantly if he was worried about her or concerned that she would lose consciousness before he got the answers to his questions.

"I'll be okay," she muttered from beneath a tangle of hair.

"I assume so, Miss Granger," Snape muttered.

Nice, Snape... I see the stellar social skills haven't improved over a decade of being dead. She snorted softly and gingerly sat up. He hadn't moved. She recognized the posture of a condemned man awaiting his verdict.

"I'll spare you the blow-by-blow of the last ten years, but here's the bottom line," she began. "The pieces of Voldemort's soul were like acid." She paused, watching his face closely. "Anybody who spent time around one was contaminated and anybody who destroyed one..." Her voice wavered and she had to stop to steady herself. "Those of us who destroyed one have been gradually... falling apart. It's taken years to become obvious, but the problems have been accelerating for all of us... That's how I finally figured out the common element. But I can't work out why or how it happens. All I know is that anybody who came into contact with those bits of soul...they're dying, Snape." She looked him bleakly. "And there isn't a damned thing that anybody has been able to do about it."

***

The questions crowded his thoughts, but none had enough shape to find voice. He wanted to know who was falling apart. How...? He had not kept himself away from the wizarding population, hidden for years, only to find out that death and destruction had not ceased with victory over the Dark Lord.

"Who?" He looked surprised that he had spoken. "Who is dying?"

Her astonished expression hurt; had he done such a thorough job of convincing the wizarding population of his heartlessness? He turned to pull another wooden chair towards him, settling himself next to the witch. Waiting.

"It's different for each of us," she began. "Each of us who dealt with a Horcrux." She hesitated, and he wondered what she was so reluctant to share.

"Who?" he insisted. "Apart from yourself, who else is affected?"

"Harry," she sighed, "obviously. Ron. Ginny. Neville." She stopped, but he could see that there were more. "Most of the witches and wizards who came into direct contact with one of the Horcruxes are dead." She looked at him meaningfully, and he wondered if she thought he knew who she meant.

"Dumbledore," he whispered. She nodded shortly.

"Bellatrix Lestrange probably owed a great deal of her insanity to Horcrux exposure, on top of the damage wrought in Azkaban," she added, and Snape shuddered to think about the sort of entity that could top the horrors of the wizarding prison.

"There are more, aren't there?" he asked. She sighed again, and he felt his heart flutter against his chest.

"Arthur Weasley," she murmured, and he leapt from his seat and began to pace. He knew. He knew what she was going to say. He did not want her to say it. He did not want to hear. He didn't have to know; he had lived years without knowing.

"What Horcrux did Arthur Weasley handle?" The words burst from him of their own volition.

"He didn't handle a Horcrux, Snape." Granger's eyes were sad, and Snape refused to hold her gaze, pacing... pacing. "He was bitten by one." Pacing. Pacing... "Just like you."

****************************

A/N: Apologies for the lengthy interval between chapters. I hope that the next will come more quickly.

Thanks to the betas who shall not yet be named.

Thanks also to Tales of Snape for the fabulous banner!