A Dark Time For The Light

96

The tension was thick all over the cadres. Alice drove north to do her latest buy and brought Neville back with her. The boy was clearly tense by her side, and she hated a tense passenger. “C’mon, Nev, we’ve got a CD player in this heap. Put one of yours on”. He eagerly dug into his backpack and fished out his metal favourites and they bopped and headbanged back to London to classic Led Zeppelin. She dropped him at the House before going to meet the new stash.

As usual, within an hour it was all gone, once she had made her calls, but the smell still hung around as folk started to drift in for the evening class to her Bunker. Another sedate class on Runes. George and Caroline breathed deep but made no comment, several people turned their heads and audibly sniffed but they were polite and said nothing, just smiling at Alice after class as she locked up for the night.

****

Hermione sat in the van going alternately hot and cold. She had the cloak bunched in her hands. She was wearing her overalls, her hair tucked away, her tool belt around her middle and Ginny’s arms around her shoulders. Everyone was present including a handsome tabby cat lounging along the shelf below the windscreen, despite the fact it was dark.

The van parked up in a quiet side street and Steffie asked everyone to sit on the floor. Hermione climbed out and donned the cloak, along with the two Aurors and the cat. Tonks and Alastor made a quick map of the perimeter with their wands held discreetly up sleeves. They had been schooled in the wearing of muggle technology. Alastor growled, “Recognition wards, but nothing special”. Tonks joined in, “Anti-Apparation wards except for recognisable signatures”. Alastor gasped, “Bugger. I just ran in to his signature. Ugh. I think,...No, hang on. It’s his personal Apparation point. Want me to disable it?”. Hermione’s voice came back in a whisper, “No, but we’ll do it on the night after he gets here”.

She was creeping around the house making notes on the security arrangements or apparent lack of them. There were rudimentary locks on the windows, nice easy sashes to break into, a couple of easy Mortices front and back. A deadlock that could be easily sawn through on the double French windows. In fifteen minutes she was in the back door with her bag of tricks. Josie guided her through the house. There was a single bolt on the cellar door, “He’s so complacent. Is he really so stupid?”, Hermione murmured, as she stripped the cloak off and got to work, adding a microphone and for good measure a light sensitive black and white camera to the set up. She set the extension switch, “Try channel nine”. She heard Josie’s squeal in her ear, “Done it, darlin’. You’re a fuckin’ genius. Now get the fuck out of there”.

She turned to go, flipping the cloak around her when a flickering touch to the back of her leg made her freeze. On the other end of the phone line, they all heard her gasp. There was an urgent, “What is it?” from Ron. Hermione’s voice wavered, “I don’t know, it’s dry and cold and slithering. It’s...., oh fuck!!”.

Dean took over the conversation, “It’s Nagini, Voldemort’s familiar. She produces venom, but she’s a constrictor”. “Thanks, she’s trying to wrap around me and she’s bloody heavy”. Ron came out of his horrified trance, “Call Harry, he’s the only one that can talk to her”. Dean said, “Hermione, I’m breaking the connection. Hang up and I’ll get Harry to call you back to speak to the damn snake, punch it if you have to, but it’s venom is no worse than a wasp sting, I hope you’re not allergic to wasp stings?”. Hermione laughed weakly and hung up. It was a very long few minutes or so before Harry called her, “Oh, thank fuck for that, Harry, I think this thing wants to either make me her best friend or eat me for dinner”. He instructed her to grab it by the throat, shine a light in it’s eye and hold the phone to it’s ‘ear’. Hermione said, dryly, “That takes three hands, Harry, I only have the two, genius or not”.

Harry chuckled, “Forget the light”. Hermione was instructed how to find the little ‘hearing port’ on the creature’s head with her phone and Harry said strange and bizarre things into the snake’s ear. The result was good. The snake unwound herself from Hermione and after a quick Parseltongue version of the obliviate charm, simply slithered away.

Hermione breathed, in out, in out, and got the beating of her heart under control. She gathered her tools together with shaking hands, forgetting she had no outside link with the others. She tucked her phone away and left, relocking the door with a simple undetectable charm that would cause the lock to break next time it was used. It would have been replaced next time they came and she didn’t worry too much about it as she flicked the cloak over her and made her way back to the van

Everyone was sitting tense and sweating until they saw a jubilant Hermione running towards them. She tipped into the van along with two Aurors and a tabby cat who waited to get back to the Bunker to transfigure for fear of leaving a signature. As her real self, Minerva watched all the footage she had gathered as a cat, then watched as it was configured into the schematic and printed out.

Tonks summed it up for the Aurors when she said, “This isn’t headquarters. It’s his playground, like a summer house. There’s only the absolute elite allowed here. The wards only admit fifty three people. It’s the perfect place to get the top people. He commands from here but his main troops are elsewhere”.

Hermione chipped in, “The security is a piece of piss. I can’t believe he’s being this lax. I can’t get over the idea of a trap although I saw and sensed nothing”. The after event was at Bunker 8 with as many people as could, attending. They now had a full map up to and beyond the perimeter of the property. A place to park up the vans on the Night. How to get in. How many to assign to each location. Where to place them. Tony was busy with maps and micro-diagrams of the terrain, plotting the place square foot by square foot.

Then a much larger diagram was printed out on several sheets. Alice cut them up and assembled them carefully then hung it on the back of one of her folded away bookshelves.

Hermione stepped up with a pen and made notes on the diagram of the house itself, explaining as she went along, “Two Mortices, not even sevens, just five lever, I can be in ‘em in about ten minutes each. Standard wooden sash windows. Victorian. No special locks, bust ‘em with a well-aimed screwdriver. The French window has an old fashioned lock, we could be through it with a hacksaw in moments. Basic alarm system. I can take it out in no time. We can either break the windows old-fashioned style and give us more exits or just use the doors, but I vote for more ingress, hit ‘em all at once, then wait for all the others to arrive back from the false alarms, after, erm, you know, we kill the first lot”.

A voice spoke out, Dean, “How do we know we’ll kill ‘em all?”. Hermione rolled her eyes, “We don’t. It’s as simple as that. What can I say?. We just have to try and not be, erm, squeamish”. “Ah, come on, ‘Mione, we all saw folk die in front of us in the Final Debacle”, Seamus. Hermione looked down. “Yes we did, didn’t we”, she whispered. ‘But we didn’t kill all of them’ was her afterthought.

****

Oh God!! Charlie Weasley just fell dead! Shit, now Millicent from Slytherin. They don’t care!. They don’t fucking CARE!. They don’t give a shit who dies just so long as they get Harry. Somewhere out of the corner of my eye I see him run back into the castle. I try to get to him, to follow him. Ron is nowhere to be seen. I run back, killing two random masked Death-Eaters as I pass,. To my dying day I will probably never know whose lives I ended.

I realise I have lost Harry. He is too fast a runner. I’m a yoga girl, he, a Quidditch player. I take the right path, however, and am just there in time to squint round a corner and see Draco being hauled away like a sack of coal and Harry stagger to his feet before a tall Death-Eater drags him away by the front of his robes.

****

She came back as she felt the heat of Ginny’s arms around her and realised she was cold, she shivered as heat spread back into her limbs. The group broke up. They would meet again early next week along with the rest of the army. The plans were in place, the folk were assembling and trained as best as possible in so short a time. The members of the cadres had gathered, either for their diversion or to converge on London for the main mission.

The atmosphere thickened yet again. The main mission would take place in five nights’ time. At the time of the full moon.