Especially Our Enemies

Minerva started the spell working in a glass bowl on her desk.

“This could take an hour or more,” she warned me.

“I know,” I said, taking a seat.

The bowl began to hum as though someone had run a damp finger around the lip. Minerva leaned forward to look into it, and the hum turned into a high whine.

“Minerva, don’t!” I shouted, leaping to push her out of the way. The glass bowl exploded, sending hot shards everywhere. I carefully picked her up off the floor, dusting her robes.

“I should have known,” she sighed, pushing me away gently.

“What does it mean?” I asked.

“That someone of immense power has your son,” she said. She looked into my eyes. “Ron, I’m so sorry.”

I grabbed my robe from the chair where I’d left it and walked towards the door of her office.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“To Hogsmeade,” I said. “I have a phone call to make.”

I inwardly cursed the wards that prevented me from apparating as I ran down the path. It would be the middle of the night in New York, I knew, but this was too important. Besides, I needed Hermione with me on this. She was cool and logical, and she could tell me what I had to do. I realized as I arrived at the edge of Hogsmeade that I had forgotten to bring any money for the phones.

Instead, I veered towards Neville and Margaret’s house. She was half Muggle, I remembered. Surely she would have had a phone installed in their house.

They were eating breakfast when I pounded on their door.

“Ron, mate, what’s wrong?” Neville asked. I held up a hand, panting.

“Give me a minute,” I gasped. My lungs were on fire.

“Come on in,” he insisted, closing the door behind me as I did. I sat on the couch for a moment to catch my breath.

“Snape is dead. Malfoy’s run off. My son is missing.” I wiped sweat from my brow; I was beginning to shiver, despite how hot I felt.

“Oh my god,” Neville said.

“Do you have a phone? I need to call Hermione.”

“Sure, sure,” he said, leading me into the den. I grabbed the phone and started dialing; he went back into the kitchen to tell Margaret what was going on.

“Hello?” Hermione asked sleepily.

“’Mione, it’s Ron,” I said quickly.

“Ron, it’s four o’clock in the morning,” she muttered. “Are you drunk?”

“No, I am most certainly not,” I said. “Although at the moment I’m contemplating it.”

I heard a loud click, and some shuffling.

“What’s up?” she asked.

“It’s about Chaz,” I said. “He’s gone.”

“Gone?” she demanded. Oh, now she was awake.

“Some serious shit has been going on here,” I said. “Snape’s been murdered.”

“Chaz didn’t run off, did he?” she asked.

“We think he might have been taken,” I told her.

“By whom?”

“Voldemort,” I whispered. The name had not bothered me much since the war; now it brought up that same sick dread it conjured when I was a boy.

“No,” she said.

“It gets worse,” I said. “Malfoy has gone with him.”

“I knew we couldn’t trust him,” she hissed.

“What should we do?” I asked.

“I’ll try and catch a portkey as soon as I can. I may have to bring the girls with me.”

“Alright.”

“See you soon,” she said.

“Bye.”

When I put down the receiver, Neville was standing in the doorway.

“Can’t hold grudges forever,” he said musingly.

“I can’t believe it,” I said.

“I tried to warn you about him,” Neville said, his hands balled into tight fists at his sides. “About what he can do.”

“What did he do to you?” I asked. He looked away, and I grabbed him by the shoulders.

“What did he do to you?” I demanded, shaking him gently.

“Magic wasn’t working,” he said. His voice was almost a whisper. “I’d worked too hard to let him break me. I was going to make my parents proud.”

Neville’s eyes were glassy with tears, but he kept his features straight. Only the slightest tremble appeared at the corner of his mouth.

“He used a knife at first, but I still didn’t tell him what he wanted to know.” Neville was breathing hard now. “That’s when he …”

“I’m sorry, mate,” I said quickly. “You don’t have to.”

“Yes I do,” he said, drawing himself up. The tears were gone.

“He put me down on my knees, made me. You know.” He looked up at me. I had never noticed how green his eyes were, almost like Harry’s. I shivered.

“God, Nev.”

“And that laugh,” he said, the anger starting to well up in his voice. “He was laughing at me the whole time, just like he’s always laughed at me.”

“I should have listened to you, Neville,” I said, touching his arm. “I shouldn’t have trusted him.”

“No sense in blaming yourself for it,” he said. “Now come on, Margaret is worried sick about you.”

The sweat had dried on me, and I took a glass of water Margaret offered me.

“Tell me what happened,” she said. She sounded just like my mother. It was all at once comforting and terribly painful.

“Last night after I left you two I went to have dinner with Draco Malfoy, the Defense teacher.” Her mouth tightened; of course she knew who Malfoy was. I would imagine she had had a pretty rough time trying to undo what he had done. “He was acting really strangely, talking about part of him going on vacation. When he went to show me something, he couldn’t remember what it was.”

Neville stood behind Margaret’s chair and put his hands on her shoulders.

“He took me back to his quarters and showed me his Dark Mark. It was totally black, and he started to flip out. He said we should go find Professor Snape, so we did.” I grimaced despite myself. “Snape was dead when we got to his quarters.”

“Poor old bastard,” Neville murmured.

“He said we had to tell Minerva, but halfway to her office he attacked me. One of the other professors found us struggling, and Malfoy dropped a ceiling on him. Then he ran off into the woods.” I took a drink of water. “We found him in the thestral clearing. It was a trap, and when I went to him I was transported someplace. Voldemort was there.”

Neville’s face went stony; Margaret squirmed. She was just a little older than Chaz when the Great War began, I recalled.

“I barely escaped, and Malfoy found me. He helped me find my way back to the castle, and then he took off after Voldemort. This morning when we announced the lockdown to the students, Chaz was gone, and we think they took him.”

“That is very serious,” Neville murmured.

“You reached your wife?” Margaret asked. I didn’t bother to correct her.

“She’s catching the first portkey out of New York,” I said.

“Hermione’s got a cool head on her shoulders,” Neville said. I nodded and finished my water.

“I should get back to the castle,” I apologized. “I’m sorry to drag you folks into this.”

“We can take care of ourselves,” Neville said stoutly. “I’m more worried for your son.”

So am I, I thought.

I walked outside and heard a loud screeching sound. Bugsy dropped out of the air onto my shoulder. He wasn’t carrying anything, and I looked around to see if he’d accidentally dropped a letter.

“I sent him along to catch up to you,” a voice called. I looked up the hill and into the face of my brother, Percy.

“I can’t take much more of this,” I said. He caught up to me.

“You’re not seeing things,” he reassured me, touching his chest. “I’m quite real.”

“Where have you been for the last fifteen years?” I asked.

“All will be revealed,” he said. Then he looked me over and smiled. “Is this the welcome I get after being dead for over a decade?”

I let him embrace me; squeezed me tightly, as if he could somehow put all the missing time into a single embrace. He was much shorter than I remembered, but then I had put on about six inches since the last time he was in the family’s good graces.

“I’d like you to come with me,” he said, releasing me.

“Why?” I asked.

“To rescue your son.”