Alternatives

A Job to Do

Julius took to field work with speed and effectiveness when he finally had a team willing to work with him in the first place. The case success rate earned him a few looks of respect instead of the usual fear he had come to expect. Though he was quite happy with the promising start, Drake had a few other thoughts on the matter.

“For the love of kittens, Jules, sleep is something we are supposed to do daily, not weekly. How much back up do you think I’ll be good for if I fall over from exhaustion?” the senior Hunter was now sporting impressive dark circles under his eyes from his young partners relentlessness on case work.

“Quit whining. The department finally took my suggestion and gave us an espresso machine, go make use of it.” the small man replied flippantly.

‘Yeah cause you scare us more without the caffeine’ Drake thought “Sure, that’s just what I need, to be so jittery I start aiming at nothing. You got a death wish or something?”

Jules just rolled his eyes “No, I have a wish to stop idiots from continuing to do stupid things. If you can’t keep up, find me a new partner.”

“New? You’re lucky to have ANY partner right now. The rest of R.H.D. still thinks you’re a few sandwiches short of a whole picnic.”

“Well there you have it. Caffeinate and move your ass. We have a multi-being heroin ring to shut down. If you quit procrastinating we can get the questioning started by noon.” said the youth in a frightfully chipper tone with a manic glint in his large green eyes.

“What are you-“Drake’s jaw dropped in shock before he could finish his train of thought. “Oh no, we are not just going in the front door to a mafia operation.”

“Sure we are.” his partner replied with a sugary smile on his full lips. “They’ll never expect a frontal assault.” he continued talking about their impending death like trip to the zoo. “Same M.O. as always, cripple first, question later. Chop, chop, let’s move. It’ll be fun.”

“FUN! See, this is why everyone thinks you’re nuts.”

The rest of the group hadn’t found partners yet, but this was fine with Vlad and Ivan. They had enough violence with their life previously, and the peaceful days of waiting for partners and cases left them many hours to comb through Inks recourses for anything they may be the slightest bit curious about.

Between Jules’ description and the name Albus, they were able to find that headmaster Albus Dumbledore of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry was the most likely candidate. According to the Records Department, he was already suspected of war mongering, intentional endangerment of minors with a class A dark being, assassination, and child slavery, but there was not enough proof to convict him on the charges as of yet. To complicate the quest for retribution even further, he was also the most loved figure in wizarding Britain.

There was however a group in Britain that showed potential to help. Calling themselves the Death Eaters, this organization was claming that pureblood relatives of theirs were convicted for crimes they had not committed without due process. Though they were calling for government reformation, they were also labeled a terrorist group and most of the members were arrested after their leader vanished and they had lost the war.

Given the way politics tend to work, the brothers decided a closer investigation of the group was in order. If they had been falsely accused of terrorism because the government wanted to stay corrupt, it would hardly be the first time. And if they knew Albus sold one child into slavery, chances were quite high that he had done other terrible things and pissed off other people.

Looking more closely at wizarding Britain, they soon found other oddities. For one, they only had one news paper, and an extremely biased one at that. Additionally, they all seemed to think that a two year old was the cause of death of the leader of the Death Eaters. Stranger yet, the leader, referred to only as the Dark Lord, was declared dead without any sign of what happened to his body.

“Ivan?” Vlad queried.

“Yes Vlad” his brother looked up.

“Is it just me, or is something seriously wrong with this story? In a magical battle between 3 adult wizard folk, one of witch is so scary they won’t even write his name, the toddler wins?” Vlad wondered out loud.

“That dose sound quite absurd. There must be something left out of the papers. Let’s go ask in Records if they have a more accurate account of this event then ‘The Daily
Prophet’. And that the dumbest name I ever heard for a paper anyway. They report what happened already (badly), not what will happen.”

“But, Ivan, since you reached 7’3 and I’m up to 7’2, everyone in that department looks at us like we’ll just take their heads and go smashy smashy with them.”

“Good. That means after they finish pissing themselves that we should be answered quickly out of shear terror. If not, we’ll just lick them till they answer to make us go away.”

“Lick them? Why the hell would I want to lick a random stranger?” Vlad looked at the blond like he’d lost it.

Ivan replied sagely “It’ll make them wonder too. Things like ‘Is the big bad human coming on to me?’ or ‘Do they think they’re dogs? I hope they don’t bite.’”

“But they’re vampires. How is biting scary for a bunch of beings who suck blood on a regular basis?”

“Ah, but you see their teeth are sharp and made for it. Ours are dull and will hurt a lot more.” Ivan replied with a sinister grin.

“Good point.”

The records clerk they talked with was a wiry and mousy looking man whose nametag declared to be John. Fortunately, due to showing intellect rather then a primitive need to take his face and go smashy smashy, the pissing and licking could be skipped. John had also had issues with the Potter story, and having fellow researchers to share his pet project with had him warming up to the massive brothers quickly.

“What you need to understand first is that I’m old enough to remember things during the war. Every other week Dumbledore was trying to call the R.H.D. in with claims that the Dark Lord was using and abusing one being or another and wanted us to lock him up for it. Well, we would follow up and all the reports would come back negative. The only non human he had anything to do with was a goblin book dealer, and he quite liked the fellow as a customer.”

“Why would Dumbledore think the dark lord was working with beings with no evidence? Wouldn’t crying wolf make him look rather sloppy?” Ivan wondered.

“That comes down to politics. You see if there are no non human beings directly involved in a case, it falls to the Ministry of Magic to solve. If by some chance, however small, this Dark Lord had managed to recruit a non human as a solider or worked directly with one and this lead to deaths, then we would have to investigate, and since the Dark Lord was marked as a terrorist by his government, we would have to take him in. By Dumbledore’s view point, it was better to call us every week on the off chance something turned up and drag us into the war then it was to wait till he had some evidence.”

Connecting the dots, Vlad offered “So he was trying to force you into allegiance.”

“Tried, failed, and tried again. Vamps as a whole were glad when it ended, though given the machinations of the leader and the story we got of how it ended, we though we better be sure of the facts incase he tried to rope us into another war. And as it is we still have agents for the Intel department dogging his steps in the hopes that we can stay out of trouble.”

“So the department has made an investigation. What turned up? Please tell me a toddler didn’t really kill a grown man when there were two other adults in the battle.” Ivan asked in disbelief.

“Well, to begin with, the being count for the battle was actually 5 adults, and a two year old. One of the unlisted was Dumbledore himself, and the other that wasn’t mentioned was Bellatrix Lestrange, the Dark Lords best general if our reports were correct. The magic used in the battle was so intense it took 2 years for it to subside enough for a Clairvoyant to even get a read on the location. And in spite of having access to the largest library in the world, the spells that caused that level of fall out are as of yet unidentifiable.”

Having read up on Inks before the Albus research began, this rather puzzled Ivan “How do you get magic that strong to be unknown? Surely there would have been some record of a spell with that kind of power. And I thought that most cases of sites with spell fall out were readable within hours of the casting.”

“True, most of the time, however before the wizards standardized teaching magic, there was no library for them to speak of. All spells, charms, potions, and even important magic events were recorded in hand written family book called a ‘Book of Shadows’. Even after the founding of Hogwarts, most families were wary of giving out too much of the knowledge they had acquired over the generations and continued to use the family book for important dates and discoveries.”

“Well then it must be in one of those. We just have to check-“but the blond was cut off.

“Not likely. Most of them come with blood protections, meaning you can’t read it if you aren’t the most direct descendent alive to the original writer of the book. Sometimes the death of a family line can weaken the magic, but rarely. A few have been duplicated by families over the centuries and added to Inks, and we checked those with no matches. If a family out there knows more, they aren’t telling us.”

“What about this Dark Lord? Did he really die?” Vlad asked.

“We don’t know that either, but we do know his body was removed from the site by his general, not vaporized like the paper said so he could be alive, dead, or in a magical coma someplace. Any time you play with spells that leave such a highly concentrated field, there is a good chance of damaging or warping your magical core. That sort of thing could cripple or kill depending on the specific effect.”

“If this is so bad for an adult, what about the kid? Don’t we have an age restriction on magically charged places because it can hurt their cores while they’re still in the early part of development?” the brunet asked.

“Also true. And little Harry is no exception. Our agents managed to track him to primary school a few years back, and his core is a sorts of messed up, he’s had his power bound three ways from Sunday by an unknown caster, and he’s still has enough to accidentally apparate. Add to that mess that his dark magic saturation point would drive a seasoned curse breaker mad, and you have one screwed up little boy. The-Boy-Who-Lived is right, since according to all our info the radical core alteration and dark magic should have had him dead within days. All we can figure is that moving him to muggle Surry saved his life.”

“It sounds like if he ever broke the bindings on his power that he would go off like a bomb.” Ivan commented in awe.

“Now you know why we watch him too.”

“I had read that the reason for the war was that the Death Eaters clamed their government had wrongfully imprisoned family members. Is there any evidence to support that claim?” Vlad wondered.

“Yes, loads of it. And it goes back to when wizards declared any crime not involving non humans to be out of our jurisdiction, around 1200 A.D. and took over the rest. It’s been a long standing tradition for public officials to bribe the courts into arresting political enemies. The new trend however, and the one that upset the Death Eaters, is for the last few members of a dieing line to end up in prison. It’s like some one is systematically trying to wipe out the old families and that one IS in our jurisdiction since a number of them have non human blood.”

The brothers shared a look. This was going to get more interesting then they would have liked.