Keogh

~***~

May 27th, 1978

“No?”

Geoffrey Trout looked up from the file on his desk and gave the woman before him a cool, appraising look. “That is my answer, St. James. No.”

Kathryn leaned forward, placing her fingertips onto the polished surface of his desk. He glanced down at them briefly, confirming they were empty. She had an annoying habit of bypassing security when coming in simply so she could keep some weapon or another on her person. Not that she needed them, of course. Kathryn had other ways to rid herself of an opponent. She just preferred to do it manually. “I believe you wish to rethink that decision, Trout.”

“No, I don’t think that I do.” He leaned back in his desk, folding his arms over his chest. “I will not have our operations here jeopardized, which is exactly what would happen if we go poking our noses into their business.”

“Do you honestly think they don’t know about people like us already? They do! Hiding your head in the sand isn’t going to change that.”

“There is no proof of how much they know.”

“You want me to find out for you? I’ve learned where the greatest concentrations of them live, and they bury their dead just like everyone else. I can have a full report for you in under an hour.” Her voice dripped with derision.

He had no doubt she could learn just how much the wizards knew about the ESPers. She probably already knew. It would be a simple matter of scanning her thoughts, but he’d done that before and had found it distasteful. There were other things inside her mind besides her own thoughts. Cold, alien things. Dead things. “Kathryn, my decision is final. I will not approve you to put together a team to search for the necromancer. We will not get involved in this war.”

“Fine.” She straightened up, letting her hands fall to her sides. The motion made her long duster billow briefly and he caught a flash of polished metal. She did love her sai. “I’ll do it myself, then.”

“No, you won’t.”

She gave a snort. “And who’s going to stop me? You?”

He narrowed his eyes. “Kathryn, I am still in charge of this facility and I still call the shots.” He rose from his desk, taking the fingertip pose she had held a moment ago. “You will not disobey me on this. As long as you are a member of this organization you will follow my rules.”

The moment the words had left his mouth, he knew he’d gone too far. Kathryn was not some telepath huddling inside E-Branch for protection from the pressing throng of minds outside or some telekinetic in search of balance to keep her from blowing up things at random. Kathryn St. James didn’t struggle to understand her abilities; she had mastered them before she’d entered puberty. And she didn’t need them; they needed her.

He watched in silence as she reached into an inside pocket of her duster and pulled out her E-Branch security badge. “Talk to you later, Trout. Preferably after you’re dead and cold. Something tells me it will do wonders for your personality.” Without another word she dropped the badge on his desk, turned on her heel and walked out of his office.

~***~

Hermione was starving. If the delegates from Beauxbaton and Durmstrang didn’t arrive soon she just might have to resort to patting down Ron for one of the chocolate frogs she knew he was hiding on him somewhere. And she was freezing! She was starving and freezing! This was simply too much to tolerate.

Although, she did welcome the unexpected break from her training. Professor Dumbledore had sent her a message that, due to their guests arriving this evening, they would not be meeting for her wand work. He also reminded her that attendance for the arrival of their guests was mandatory and thus she should not do her physical training.

Thus, instead of being distracted from her stomach, she was starving. By the time they got around to having dinner her table manners would have devolved into something akin to Ron’s.

“So how much longer do we have to wait? I’m getting tired of your complaining.”

“Then go spy on someone.”

“Who? All the interesting people are out here. Oh, look, it’s Cedric.” Hermione’s eyes were drawn unwillingly to the Hufflepuff students where Cedric was helping keep the younger ones in line. They were getting quite restless. “Hmmm… he’s a bit too good at that.”

“At what?”

“Managing kids. That’s a clear sign of a breeder. I think we’re well shut of him. A man like that will likely get a girl with as many kids as the Weasleys. We’ll find you some well-endowed rogue to play with. No need for the first one to be serious at any rate.”

She was certain her face had turned eight different shades of red. Harry must have seen it do so. “You all right, Hermione?”

“Fine.” She said it a bit too quickly. “I hate you.”

“All teenage girls hate their mothers. It’s instinctual.”

Someone cried out and pointed upwards. All eyes and heads craned up to see a small dot that got larger and larger as it drew closer. Hagrid waved in a massive carriage that was as bigger than some houses she’d seen, drawn by a team of gigantic winged horses. She was impressed. They all were.

If the carriage and horses weren’t enough, Madam Maxime was definitely someone to notice. She was bigger than Hagrid from the look of her, and her massive form shadowed her students who all looked impossibly small next to her. Kathryn, of course, had a different response from the Hogwarts students. “About damn time Hagrid got lucky. He’s a decent enough sort.”

Hermione began to dread what the dead woman might say about the Durmstrang students when they arrived.

Everyone was watching the skies until someone noticed the whirlpool that had formed in the lake. Mesmerized, all stood and watched as a giant, hulking ship emerged from the water and glided to the shore. Shadowy figures moved past lit portholes and onto the deck before coming down the gangplank. Hermione looked on with the same unabashed curiosity as she studied the new arrivals. Where the Beauxbaton students had been clad in blue uniforms that had made even the boys seem to move with an elegant grace, the students of Durmstrang looked surprisingly fierce in their furs and cloaks.

"I don’t like that headmaster. There’s something fishy about him.”

Hermione rather thought the same. The man’s teeth were almost as bad as Severus and he had an ‘oily’ feel about him. “We shouldn’t judge by looks alone. He might be quite nice.”

“Somehow I seriously doubt that.”

Hermione didn’t respond because she was too busy being jostled by Ron who had just realized that one of the Durmstrang students was his idol Viktor Krum. “For Heaven’s sake, Ron, he’s only a Quidditch player!”

Ron acted as though she’d slapped him. She could almost feel Kathryn double over in laughter. “Oh, you’re in for it now! Never insult a man’s sports idol. For that matter, never insult a man’s sport. They’re right stupid about it.”

“Right stupid sums up Ron and Harry when it comes to Quidditch, all right.”

And finally they could go back inside! The castle was lovely and warm after standing outside for so long. The Great Hall had been done up to the nines, looking even better than the Welcoming Feast. Hermione sat with Harry and Ron as usual but might as well have been invisible. Ron was too busy looking at Krum and hoping he’d come join their table. He even went so far as to tell Hermione to budge up. The nerve!

Still, just as it looked as though Krum was going to sit next to Draco Malfoy, his eyes landed on their table. More specifically they landed on her. He frowned a bit, as if trying to remember something that eventually did come to him. He leaned over to one of the other Durmstrang boys next to him, pointing in her direction while they spoke. Then, to her surprise, they appeared to have changed their minds about sitting with the Slytherins and came round to their table.

Ron was ecstatic. Harry gave a snort. “Of course, Ron. Krum met Hermione at the World Cup. He knows she can understand him.”

Ron turned a blinding smile to her. “Did I ever tell you that I absolutely adore your brains? I really do!” He was still smiling as he scooted over a bit to make room for Krum and his friend. Since Krum already knew her, he took the seat right next to her, his friend between him and Ron.

He gave her a somewhat shy smile and spoke to her in Bulgarian. “I hope you do not mind if we sit here. My accent makes my English hard to understand.”

She shook her head but was internally kicking herself again for showing off at the Cup. “We don’t mind. We want you to feel welcomed here.” She introduced Harry and Ron as well as several of the other students nearby. There was a buzzing about the hall and she knew that a good number of students were wondering how she, Hermione Granger, came to be sitting next to the World Famous Viktor Krum.

Of course, acting as interpreter meant she didn’t get through much of her meal while it was still hot. Krum seemed to notice this and looked abashed. He apologized and made her a quiet promise to keep the rest of the students from his school from bothering her too much. It was the first time she thought about the fact that word that there was at least one student at Hogwarts they could speak to without feeling like idiots was likely to get out.

With the meal done all eyes turned to Dumbledore as he called for their attention. Mr. Crouch was on hand to give them the rules of the Tournament. It was the first time anyone at Hogwarts had been told about the age restriction, though it was clear that the other schools knew about it and had brought only those students old enough to put in their names.

Actually, she thought the age restriction was a brilliant idea. She still didn’t think that the tourney was all that great an idea. She’d done more reading on it and the more she’d learned the less she liked it. There were some very good students at Hogwarts, but they were still just students.

“Don’t sell them short, Hermione. You’d be surprised what people can do if they really want to succeed.”

Still, something didn’t feel right to her. Hermione watched as the Goblet of Fire was removed from its casket for all to see. Eternal glory indeed. What use was that to anyone?

~***~

“You want to find who?”

Michael sighed and slumped down in his chair. “Trout, and I don’t particularly want to find the bastard. I just want to know where he is.”

Evangeline Stroud, the current head of E-Branch, gave him a speculative look. “I know you, Michael. You wouldn’t be asking if you didn’t have a feeling that something’s going to blow up in our faces.”

“A feeling is all I’ve got. You know the dreams are shaky at best.”

“But they often point you in the right direction. And Trout… well… we could put some of the stronger clairvoyants or precognitives on it. See if they can get a sense of any plots.” Turner didn’t look overly enthusiastic about that idea. “What have you done?”

“What makes you think I’ve done anything?”

Stroud arched a brow at him. “I’m an empath, remember? And right now you’re feeling guilt and worry. Mostly guilt. That means you’ve done something to be guilty about. It’s not like you, Michael. You’re the straightest arrow we’ve got.”

“Well, thing is, I’ll have to admit to some rather dodgy behavior.”

“How dodgy?”

“The kind you get sacked over.” He shrugged. “See why I don’t want to say?”

Evangeline mulled it over in her mind for a bit. “All right. I’ll grant you complete immunity starting today and going for a full fourteen days. Anything you tell me within that time frame will not go on your record nor will it get you sacked unless you tell me you’ve murdered someone, for which I will turn you in. In exchange, you do not get to delete any memory of anything you might say unless it’s something I specifically request you delete. Good enough?”

If anyone else had said it to him, he’d turn them down. However, Stroud was a straight shooter and he trusted her implicitly. E-Branch had become a better place to work since she’d replaced Trout. The ESPers were no longer treated as tools or things, but rather as people. And the days where it was common practice to stab one another in the back to get ahead were gone, the last few remaining dinosaurs from that era now leashed. “Only for you, Evie.”

“Good.” She leaned back in her chair. “So, what’s the big secret you think might bring that piece of shite back to haunt us?”

“St. James’ kid is alive and well, and I suspect might have taken after the rest of the family.”

She froze, mouth agape. “What?” It was a cracked whisper and she forced a cough to clear her throat. “A Keogh? You think there’s actually an active Keogh out there?”

“I think it’s a fair possibility.”

“But… surely we would have noticed something. Felt something. They’re rather hard to miss when they get going. The oddness of them…”

“Well, the thing is Kathryn locked her up when she was born. Like what her father did to her grandfather.”

Evangeline flinched. “Why the bloody hell would she do something like that?”

“To hide her from Trout. She got knocked up by one of those wizard types, you see. And, well, the kid’s as much her father’s child as she is her mother’s.”

Stroud’s face went a pasty white. “Oh bloody hell.”

“That’s sort of what Trout thought, too.”

“But you think the girl’s unlocked now? How would she have managed that without Kathryn? Unless Kathryn had something to do with it.”

Turner nodded. “She did. Took the binding off directly. Easy for her to do considering… well… the thing is that St. James is dead, Evie. She had no choice but to bring the kid into the family, so to speak, but she won’t say how she died. That’s why I want to find Geoffrey. I think he might have had something to do with it.”

~***~