Live Now, Die Later - Chapter 35 (A Harry Potter Fanfiction) (Patreon)

Chapter 35: The Insult of Mercy

Cho's voice came through the web before the street did.

Two watchers. One in the opposite doorway under a notice-me-not that leaked at the edges if you already knew the house. One in an attic two roofs west, sitting too still for a man who lived there. The lane itself carried no extra wards. The townhouse protections were old family work, still live, keyed to Lestrange blood and to the sister who had kept the keys when that still served a purpose.

Harry let the report settle and kept walking. Hermione's disillusionment sat over the six of them like wet wool. Ginny kept to his left with her wand already in her sleeve. Narcissa moved as if the cobbles belonged to her by old receipt. Bellatrix had the hood of the borrowed cloak up and her pulse loud in the web, jagged and pleased.

"Side door," Narcissa said. "Service alley. The front knocker logs every stranger who touches it. The alley plate still takes my hand."

They took the alley. Rain had left the bricks slick. The air held soot and the smell of rooms shut too long. Narcissa set her palm to a narrow iron plate. The plate warmed. The bolt drew back with a dry click.

Cho stayed on the roof line. Harry felt her blue thread draw a slow circle overhead, counting windows a second time because the first count had been too clean.

Inside, the townhouse smelled of dust, old perfume, and a cellar that had not been aired since the last time someone important had needed a secret kept. Narcissa left the lamps dark. She walked as if she had left a map in her feet. Bellatrix followed with her chin high until Harry put a single pulse of the web against the old hunger in her magic and it settled.

Narcissa's order from the Nest still held. Keep her on the task. He gave the house no more attention than the work required.

The cellar stair turned twice. The portrait hung at the second landing, a heavy gilt frame around a Lestrange uncle with a mouth built for sending other people into rooms first. The painted eyes found Bellatrix and brightened with a nasty little joy.

"Bella," the portrait said, already turning its head toward whatever canvas it fed. "The lost bitch came home. Tell the room in Knockturn. Tell them she is here."

Ginny's spare wand put fire through the canvas before the sentence finished. The face burned from the mouth outward. Paint blistered. The last syllable came out as a crack and then nothing.

"Too late," Hermione said. She was already moving down. "It started the name. Assume the matching canvas has it."

Bellatrix laughed once, short and delighted. "I hung that old goat. He always did talk faster than he thought."

"Then we are on a clock that is no longer ours," Harry said. "Coffer. Now."

The under-cellar was a square of black stone with a single iron box set into the floor, neither lock face nor keyhole on it. A shallow channel ran around the lid, dark with old residue. Bellatrix knelt as if the pose still belonged to a different master, then corrected herself: spine straight, chin lifted, the Court's mark a dark point at her throat where the cloak had fallen open.

"Phrase first," Hermione said. "Then blood. If the wording has degraded, I want it in the air before we feed the box."

Bellatrix spoke the Latin the Dark Lord had taught her to mock a hymn. The words sat wrong in a pretty mouth. A low note came off the iron. The channel around the lid warmed.

She cut her palm with the knife she had oiled in the Nest armory. Blood ran into the channel and vanished without splash. For a breath nothing moved. Then the lid lifted a finger's width and stopped.

Bellatrix put her cut hand flat on the iron and pushed. The lid came up on silent hinges. Inside, on black velvet gone stiff with years, lay the walnut wand, shorter than Harry's, dark in the grain, with a core that put the taste of old storms in the air over the box.

Hermione had the lined case open before Bellatrix's fingers closed. "In. If it sings to anything on the street I want the song muffled."

Bellatrix handed it over without theatre. The case shut. Hermione slid it inside her coat against her ribs and sealed the pocket with a lock that would open to her, to Harry, and to no one else in the building.

"We leave the way we came," Harry said. "Leave the furniture standing and keep the speeches for later."

They were on the first stair when the front wards took a blow.

The strike had no courtesy in it. Dust shook out of the stairwell ceiling. Cho's thread snapped tight overhead.

"Street," she sent, clipped. "He came himself. Four with him. Masks. One of them is already cutting the alley mouth."

Narcissa's expression held. "Then the portrait earned its keep."

Bellatrix's magic surged, dark and glad. Harry put the web on it again, harder this time.

"You wanted alive after he looks," he said. "You stay that way. Ginny left. Hermione on my right with the case. Narcissa, you know which windows open onto the next street. Cho keeps the roof until I call her down."

Ginny was already moving. "If we fight in this hole, no one sees it but rats. You want him embarrassed, we take him where people drink."

"Diagon," Harry said. "Through Knockturn. He does not get a private death."

The service door they had used was gone. A cutting curse had opened the alley mouth into raw brick and night. A Death Eater in a cracked silver mask filled the gap, wand up, and died on Ginny's first hex before he finished the movement. Her face stayed work-flat. They went through him and into the lane.

Voldemort stood in the middle of the street with three remaining servants fanned behind him. The townhouse's front door was already a ruin of black splinters. He was thinner than the last public reports had made him. The ruined Manor had been starving him. Red eyes found Bellatrix first, then the case-shaped bulk under Hermione's coat, then Harry.

"The half-blood," Voldemort said, and the voice still tried to fill a throne room that was not there. "And my Bellatrix, wearing another man's mark like a dog that learned a new trick. You will put her on the stones. You will put the wand with her. Then I will decide which of your women I peel first."

Harry felt the Court at distance: Maxine a fixed point, Fleur's gold bent over unfinished letters, Tiffany's steady pressure, the rest coming awake as the web carried the spike of the Dark Lord's arrival. Power rolled into him in a clean tide. He kept it leashed. This street had no audience worth the work.

The three Death Eaters threw together: a killing curse, a cutting fan, and a charm that turned breath to glass. Hermione's shield went up in a tight lattice, ate the glass charm, and spat the residue into the gutter. Ginny took the cutter out at the knee and then at the throat. Narcissa's wandwork was small and exact; the third man found his own mask sealed to his face and went down clawing at air that would not come.

Voldemort raised his wand.

Harry lifted two fingers.

The air closed on Voldemort's wrists, throat, and knees and put him in the running gutter before the first curse cleared the tip. The remaining servant broke for the far mouth of the lane. Cho dropped from the roof line, landed clean, and put him under with a charm that would hold until morning and leave a headache worth remembering.

Voldemort fought the hold. Black magic crawled over the binding and found no seam. Harry gave the empty lane nothing else to study.

"Move him," Harry said. "Knockturn. Then the Alley. I want doors open and people standing in them."

Ginny's grin was sharp. "About time someone made him walk."

They made him walk.

The web held him upright and moving, knees stiff, mouth shut under a silence Harry had laid over it. Knockturn's night crowd was the usual mix of men who sold things that should have stayed buried and women who bought them with their faces half-covered. They saw the red eyes first. Then they saw who was walking him. Conversations died in ragged pieces. A stall of cursed silver went over when the owner forgot his hands.

The connecting passage into Diagon was a brick arch that still smelled of the Leaky's yeast even at this hour. Harry put Voldemort through it and dropped the silence as they came out under the Alley's hanging signs.

Midnight Diagon still had lights. The Leaky Cauldron had not closed. Flourish and Blotts had a clerk in the window resetting a display. Two witches from the night shift at Madam Malkin's stood under an awning with paper cups. A pair of junior Prophet staff, a photographer with a beetle-cam already half-raised and a thin reporter with ink on his cuffs, had been arguing about a column inch on the stoop. They stopped arguing.

Harry let the binding ease enough for Voldemort to find his feet and his mouth. Green showed at the edges of the hold, visible in the shop glass, and no brighter than that. Witnesses needed to see the man clearly.

Voldemort used his voice the way he had always used it, as if volume could restore a throne.

"You think a street and a few gawping blood-traitors make you a lord. You think taking my servant and my wand makes you safe. I have returned from worse than you. I have returned from death. I will unmake every filthy little"

Harry pinched the silence back for a breath, long enough to look at the photographer.

"You may work," Harry said. "If you lie about what you see, I will find the lie in print and I will come to your desk."

The beetle-cam rose. The reporter's quill shook and then found paper.

Harry let the silence go.

Voldemort tore out of the binding by burning power he could not spare. He came off the cobbles in a column of black fire and thrown bone, a stacked storm of curses so tight the air between him and Harry went opaque. Shop glass along the south side of the Alley starred and then held; Hermione had already thrown a wide ward across the storefronts that would cost her later and keep the witnesses alive now. Ginny took the left flank and knocked down a piece of flying slate before it could reach the Malkin's awning. Narcissa's face stayed a mask. Bellatrix watched her old master empty himself and made a sound that was almost a purr.

Harry walked into the storm.

Curses that had leveled houses in other years met the Court web and came apart. Fiendfyre left Voldemort's wand in the shape of a dragon with too many joints and ate three yards of rain before Harry closed his hand. The fire went out the way a candle goes out under a cloth. A ripping curse meant for souls shredded against the web and left a smell of burned hair in the air. A curse meant to boil blood hit Harry's chest and ran off him like rain off treated wool.

The Killing Curse came last, green and loud, thrown with the whole of a man who had once made a country flinch at a color. Harry caught it on an open palm. The light flattened, ran between his fingers, and died. His scar stayed quiet. That quiet had a different weight now, with the man who had put the mark standing ten feet away and learning what quiet cost.

Voldemort threw the green light again, and again, until the rhythm stuttered and the voice behind it had gone thin.

Harry reached through the last of it, took him by the front of the ruined robes, and put him on the cobbles in front of the Leaky's door hard enough that the boards inside jumped. He left the killing curse in its holster. He stood over the man who had built a war out of other people's children and let the Alley look.

"You felt the fragment die," Harry said. His voice carried without charm work. The web made sure of it. "You felt Bellatrix stop answering. You sent Narcissa to find a weakness and she brought you a memory instead. You came tonight because a portrait said a name you still think you own."

Voldemort tried to rise. Harry put him down again with a pressure that left the skin unmarked and reminded the bones they were guests in the body.

"I could end you here," Harry said. "It would be easy, and it would be wasted. You hid pieces of yourself in objects because a clean death frightened you. Kill this body tonight and those pieces pull you back. I will take the objects first. One by one. Until there is nothing left to fetch you."

He let that sit where the beetle-cam could take it and the quill could miss none of the words.

"Guess which one is next, Tom."

The name landed in the open air like a slap. Voldemort's mouth worked. For a heartbeat the red eyes went wide in a way the old portraits had never allowed, and the grandeur cracked on the sound of a given name spoken in front of clerks and barmaids and a camera. He looked at Bellatrix as if a last order might still land. She showed him her teeth and the Court's mark at her throat and said nothing.

"You are not worth a killing curse until the work is finished," Harry said. "Stay alive long enough to watch it."

He released the hold.

Voldemort looked at the photographer. He looked at the open door of the Leaky, at the witches under the awning, at the clerk in Flourish and Blotts who had stopped pretending to work. Then he did the only thing left that still resembled power. He tore a hole in the air and fell through it, robes snapping, the last of his magic a ragged black smear that the rain ate.

The hole closed.

Diagon Alley held still for three full breaths. Then the noise came back in pieces: a glass settling on a bar, a woman swearing, the beetle-cam's tiny wings going frantic as the photographer chased the last of the green out of the stones.

Harry let the field drop to a low idle. Distant threads answered him, a single instrument taking a note and holding it. Hermione's hand stayed inside her coat on the case. Ginny's wand stayed up until she had counted the crowd twice. Cho landed on the cobbles without flourish and took the south approach as if a second wave might still be late.

The staring started as soon as the danger had a shape people could survive.

The two witches from Malkin's had forgotten their cups. One had her mouth open. The other had both hands locked on the awning post. A barmaid from the Leaky stood in the doorway with a tray still in her hands and looked at Harry the way a person looks at a fire they have decided not to run from. An older shopkeeper in a buttoned coat put her palm flat to her own sternum and left it there. Hermione, who had seen the web do worse things in worse rooms, watched him a beat longer than tactics required, eyes sharp, breath a fraction off her usual count. Ginny's grin had appetite in it now as well as fight. Bellatrix looked proud in a way that had nothing left of kneeling in it. Narcissa's composure held, and under it something cooler and hungrier took a measurement she would not name on a public street.

Harry gave none of it a performance. He had come for a wand and a lesson. The lesson had landed. The wand was against Hermione's ribs.

"We are done on this stone," he said. "Nest. Before the Ministry decides this was an incident that requires a form."

They left through the Leaky's back rooms because the front door had become a problem of hands and questions. The landlord let them pass. He looked at Harry, looked at the mark on his own threshold where Voldemort had hit the boards, and reached for a bottle with the air of a man who had just watched a rumor become a fact.

Cho took the high road home. The rest flooed from a private grate Narcissa still had rights to in a side office that smelled of old ledgers. They came back through the Nest wards without ceremony. Maxine met them in the outer court with her hair braided back for work and her eyes already on Harry's hands, his scar, the way he was standing.

"Wand," she said.

Hermione put the case on the table. Maxine opened it, looked at the walnut grain, and shut it again.

"Alive," Maxine said. "And public."

Ginny rolled her shoulder as if a curse had kissed it and missed. "He emptied himself in front of the Leaky and Harry did not move an inch. The Alley saw it. The paper will have it by breakfast."

Tiffany came in from the secondary circle with a cup Harry took. She checked his pulse with two fingers at his wrist, a private count that belonged to her. The scar stayed a scar. She nodded once and stayed close without asking for a report.

Fleur stood in the inner door with ink on her thumb and the two letters still unfinished. The gold thread in the web was bright and a little wild from the distant spike of the fight. She looked at Harry, then at the case, then at Harry again, and the allure in her blood made a visible effort to stay where the Court had put it.

"Paris can wait until the paper prints," she said. "If I file now, it will look like we are running from our own noise."

"Sequence holds," Hermione said. She had already started a list on the nearest scrap. "Wand in hand. Restriction still wants Bellatrix's blood and this walnut at the inner seal. The clerk's clock is still a clock. He knows we are moving on his objects. He also knows he cannot stop the man doing the moving. That will make him sloppy, or monstrous. We plan for both."

Bellatrix leaned her hip against the table and watched the closed case. "He looked at me and found nothing he could order. I have wanted that look for a long time. When we stand in my vault, I want to take his toy out of my own velvet."

"You will," Harry said. "Not tonight."

Narcissa folded her coat over one arm. "Draco will see the Prophet before he sees me. That is useful. The memory I already gave him will sit beside a photograph of his mother's former lord on his knees in a gutter, being called by the name he buried. I will not soften that for him."

Cho stripped her flight gloves and set them down with care. "Four bodies in the lane. One sleeping. I left the sleeping one a note that the Court does not hunt men who drop their wands and run. If the Ministry wants the other three, they can have the lane. I want a bath and a count of how many brooms we stage for a bank."

Harry drank. Quiet came back around them in layers. Somewhere below, the compass rose held a low idle that had not been this certain in months. Twelve living anchors, and a lord who had just called the most feared wizard in Britain by his birth name and told him he was a task on a list.

Dawn came in on owl-wings.

The Daily Prophet did not wait for a respectable hour. The special edition hit the Nest breakfast table while the tea was still dark, the ink still damp, the front page a photograph that needed no caption for anyone who had ever feared a green light. Voldemort on his knees in Diagon cobbles. Harry Potter standing over him with rain on his shoulders and no wand raised.

The headline above the photograph was the news.

POTTER BREAKS THE DARK LORD IN DIAGON ALLEYDark Lord Flees After Failed Assault. Potter Declines to Kill. Calls Him "Tom."

The secondary banner, set in the type the Prophet reserved for society when society had become war, ran underneath in a smaller, hungrier hand.

HARRY POTTER, BRITAIN'S MOST ELIGIBLEUnmarried Lord of Two Ancient Houses, Victor of the Midnight Duel, Now the Prize Every Family Wants at Its Table

Hermione read both lines twice, then the column that quoted Harry's words with only one small lie in the punctuation. Ginny laughed into her cup, a short, fierce sound. Bellatrix traced the photograph's edge with one nail and looked satisfied enough to be dangerous. Narcissa's mouth made a line that might have been approval. Cho snorted at the eligible banner and reached for the flight schedule instead. Tiffany read the quoted sentence with her thumb on the page as if the paper might try to take it back. Fleur's allure stirred and then, with visible discipline, sat down.

Maxine set the paper in the middle of the table where all of them could see the two images at once: a lord on his feet, a monster on his knees, and a country that had just been told which of those men was still available.

Harry looked at the photograph long enough to confirm it was true. Then he looked at the closed case that held a walnut wand and a door into vault seven hundred and thirteen.

"Eat," he said. "Then we plan the bank. He is frightened now. Frightened men make mistakes with vaults and with the people they still think they own. We will be on the mistake when it opens."

Outside the wards, the first ordinary owls of the morning were already leaving London with the same damp front page. In what remained of Malfoy Manor, a thin voice that had once filled halls was spending what power it had left on stone that gave nothing back. In drawing rooms and Ministry offices and the back rooms of shops, witches who had never stood in Diagon at midnight looked at a photograph and then looked again, and the look had hunger in it.

Britain knew, by breakfast, exactly how powerful Harry Potter was.

It also knew he was unmarried, unattached in the only way the Prophet understood attachment, and finished with waiting for other people to decide the size of his life.

Voldemort knew it too.