Chapter Thirteen: Passing Notes

"Protection from Good," Milo cast on the silver, palm-sized Eye of Boccob on the desk in front of him. In his experience, it never hurt to have a couple of extra holy symbols around for when the vampires come knocking. This time, just in case, he'd created the amulet while under the effects of a separate Protection from Good spell. So even if Riddle was somehow still in his mind, he wasn't exerting any influence over this amulet. He wished he had his old spellbook back so he could cast the marginally more helpful Protection from Evil, but he might as well wish for a Candle of Invocation or the moon. He'd just have to make do with what he had, for now.

"Are you almost done yet?" Hannah asked, her arms wrapped around herself for warmth. For all that it was late summer, it was also the middle of the night, and the hovel Sirius had brought them to was far to the north. The thin glass windows (where they weren't broken) and ancient wooden walls provided little in the way of insulation.

Milo nodded. "Just finished," he said, clipping the amulet around his neck. The plot was thickening fast, and he had absolutely no intention of going anywhere without his customary Amulet of Protection—especially considering that the Ministry was after him, and they weren't known to use restraint when it came to memory modification. Still, he had to be careful crafting items for now, because he was only a hair over the threshold of level nine, and didn't have any XP to waste.

"So can we go home, now?" Hannah asked.

Sirius shook his head. The cold didn't seem to bother him as he reclined in the shabby, rat-eaten chair. "I don't recommend it. They'll be watching your house. Your disappearance will have confirmed for them that you're an accomplice with Milo, here."

"My parents will be freaking out," Hannah said. "Could I at least get a message to them?"

Milo scratched his chin. "I don't have any specialized long-range communication spells, and I've only got enough juice for one more Teleport," he admitted. "And that's if I burn all but one of my fourth-level spells. I could deliver a message, but I'd be stuck there. Sirius?"

Sirius shrugged. "They took my wand when they threw me in Azkaban," he said. "You'd have to lend me yours," he said to Hannah. "I don't have a House Elf's hope of casting a Patronus, so I'd have to Apparate there with a letter." He sighed. "But..."

"...we'd have no guarantee you wouldn't simply run off with my wand?" Hannah said.

"Yeah," Sirius said.

"I'd lend you mine," Milo said, "except that a certain dretch-lover has his bony little hands on it. And most of my other swag."

Hannah shrugged. "Okay," she said, and passed her wand, butt-first, to Sirius.

"Are you insane?" Milo choked.

"Trust me," she said.

Sirius stared at the wand as if she'd just offered him the world. In a way, Milo supposed, she had. Milo imagined he might feel much the same way when he finally got his hands on his old spellbook.

"Thank you," he said, accepting the wand. To Milo's astonishment, there were actual tears in his eyes. Hannah scribbled a quick note on a scrap of parchment from Relkin's Belt of Hidden Pouches. "You won't regret this," he said, taking the note and Disapparating with a pop.

"I repeat," Milo said, turning to Hannah. "Are you insane?"

"Think about it," Hannah said. "Now we get to test, with a reasonable degree of certainty, if we can trust him. If he returns the wand, we trust him. If he makes a run for it, we can't."

"What if he comes back to tie up the loose ends?" Milo asked.

"Have you ever seen a wizard try to cast magic with someone else's wand?" Hannah asked. "It usually takes a half-dozen tries to get even the simplest of spells working. If he comes back for us, just blind him with your glittery dust, or conjure up some tentacles to grab him, or trip him with grease. You know—the usual. If you have to, shatter the wand. I can always buy a new one."

Milo's jaw opened and shut involuntarily as he tried to come up with a counter-argument. "That's actually a pretty clever plan," he conceded grudgingly. "Reckless," he added. "But clever. So, what'd you tell your parents?"

"The truth," Hannah said. "Anything else would only complicate the situation further. But I used language that only they'd know, so if the DMLE finds the note, it won't mean anything to them. I also asked them to bring my school stuff to King's Cross tomorrow." As she spoke, her stomach rumbled noisily.

"Hungry?" Milo asked, pulling his Everlasting Rations out of his belt. Seeing as how he probably wasn't going to be able to return it to its original owner any time soon—if ever—he decided to stop thinking about it as 'Relkin's Belt.'

"Thanks," Hannah said. "I ran off before I had a chance to eat dinner." She reached into the bag and pulled out a handful of crunchy, greyish, vaguely round blobs. "Ah," she said. "These again."

"Sorry," Milo said. "I'm out of Prestidigitations, so I can't do anything about the taste."

Hannah shrugged. "There's a Charm the Weasley twins were telling me about last year that makes anything taste like peach cobbler," she said. "They use it whenever their father cooks. But I don't have my wand, and even if I did, I can't use magic in the summer."

Milo had heard about that rule, of course, but he hadn't really thought about it before. "That sucks," he said. He'd already only had to spend less than a week with reduced spell casting capacity after Voldemort took his spellbook, and it was really starting to wear on him. He couldn't imagine having to go for two months without using any magic at all.

"Yeah," Hannah said. "And it's the most surefire way I can think of to keep us from remembering anything we learned the year before. Before Hogwarts, I went to Muggle school—my parents didn't know if I'd take after my mum or my dad when it came to magic—and it was hard enough remembering, say, maths after the summer. But even then, I mean, I never did, but theoretically, I could have cracked open a textbook and brushed up during the break, right? But with magic, doing a bit of summer revising is illegal. Which is annoying, because unlike maths, floating feathers around is actually pretty fun."

Milo could hardly speak. He'd just heard what had to be the most horrifying thing he'd ever encountered. "You..." he pulled himself together. "You forget your skills if you don't use them?"

Hannah nodded.

"I mean," Milo continued, "you actually get worse? Not like, maybe getting a bit rusty and not realizing what the most effective spell to cast in a given situation is," Milo knew full well that feeling, having been thrown against a Dragon Turtle shortly after returning to his world, after only fighting wizards and the occasional Redcap for a year, "but actually forgetting how to cast the spell?"

"Yeah," Hannah said. "Not just magic, everything. Languages, facts, talents. Physical stuff, too—if we go without exercise, we get unhealthy. Is it really not like that for you?"

Milo shook his head. "I've never actually had the opportunity to speak so much as a whole conversation in Draconic," he said, "but I'm still fluent in the language. And always will be."

Hannah gave a low whistle. "Sometimes, I forget how different you are," she said.

"And so do the Death Eaters," Milo grinned. "Nobody has yet hatched an evil scheme that relies on me not perfectly remembering minutiae from years ago, but one day, someone will. And when they do..."

Milo was planning on finishing that sentence with something machismo-laden like 'bam!' before performing a pantomime punch, but instead, he was cut off by the distinctive pop! of Apparition, which he supposed worked almost as well.

Milo turned to find Sirius Black standing behind him.

"I left your letter on the kitchen table," he said, returning Hannah's wand. In his other hand, he held up a large paper bag with a bright-yellow 'M' printed on it. "I also brought dinner," he said.

"Detect Poison," Milo muttered under his breath, but the bag came up clean. He nodded to Hannah, who casually tossed the tasteless Everlasting Rations behind her and leapt at the paper bag in a manner reminiscent of a Dire Lion taking down a gazelle.

Milo forced himself to re-evaluate Sirius Black. Maybe, just maybe, he could trust this strange, fugitive shapeshifter after all—a welcome revelation, all things considered, as until he could clear up this whole 'Heir of Slytherin' business, his list of allies was remarkably short.

Either way, this whole 'on the run' business was about to come to an end. Tomorrow, one way or another, he was boarding the Hogwarts Express and going to school. Hogwarts was where the action was, where the plot happened, and where the Experience Points lay about just waiting to be claimed. The Death Eaters wouldn't dare make a move on him there—well, they had last year, now that Milo thought about it, but it had hardly been easy for them. And if the Ministry decided to have him arrested, well, they could try. In his experience, there were two distinct strands of law enforcement, depending on who had been irritated. The first was sent when a PC made an enemy of someone powerful, and were generally low-to-mid-level government employees just there for the paycheck, and could be reliably defeated in droves. If that was the case, Milo wasn't worried. But the other kind only appeared if a PC had made an enemy of the DM ('Dispassionate Moderator'), in which case, they would have at least ten levels of experience on the party, have access to unfeasibly expensive hardware for a government agency, and come in groups of essentially infinite. And if that was the case, well, Milo still wasn't worried—there wouldn't be anything he could do.

Come to think of it, though, he had been pushing the DM pretty hard of late.

To test a hypothesis, Milo reached out and tapped one of the shack's interior walls, to see if it would devolve into a pile of hundreds of quarterstaves.

Nothing happened.

Milo wondered: was that because the DM (or the gods, for that matter) had altered the nature of the universe after he had revealed such an easily-exploitable flaw, was it because of the different nature of this world versus the other one, or was it, most concerning of all, because this world had a different DM than the other one? One who made different calls, and with different motivations?

Milo's food went cold in front of him, untouched, as he drifted among his own thoughts.

o—o—o—o

Fiona woke up, and immediately wished she hadn't.

Her left leg was on fire.

She wasn't supposed to be running on it yet, possibly ever. Hell, she wasn't even supposed to be walking without a cane. Getting shot is like that, sometimes—hardly ever like in the movies, where Bruce Willis can shrug off numerous gunshot wounds in one movie and walk in on the beginning of the next with nothing to show for it but a cool scar, if that. She never did find out how she'd taken a bullet to the thigh, as those bloody wizards had taken her memory from that night, but just because she couldn't remember being shot was no reason she shouldn't remember that she had been shot. She'd just gotten so caught up in the moment, the hope that she might finally get some answers, that nothing else seemed to matter.

Her neck was hardly in better shape, having had to support a ludicrously heavy piece of military-surplus hardware for most of the night before. She wanted nothing more than to stay in bed for another hour or twelve, as even the thin mattress of the cheap motel she was staying in felt incredible in her state. She also wanted to go home, to see Sprocket, and to read a good book.

As much as she wanted to, however, she knew she couldn't. Today was the first day of term for the wizarding world, and every student attending Hogwarts was going to be at King's Cross station, according to the Daily Prophet and Hogwarts: A History. It was too good of an opportunity to pass up, much as she'd like to.

She pulled herself out of bed reluctantly, tucked the disaster that was her hair into a pony tail, threw some clothes on, grabbed her bag, and left. The sun had yet to rise, but it was all the same to her. She barely ever slept more than an hour or two at a time these days, anyway, so all this meant was that the walk to the train station would be a quiet one.

o—o—o—o

"—eleport."

King's Cross was the same as ever, albeit with a non-moving, Muggle poster or two up warning passersby that the dangerous criminal, Sirius Black, was on the loose after having escaped from an unnamed prison.

Milo wondered just how much co-operation there was between the Muggle and magical governments. Were the people at the top well aware of the magical world's existence? Was the Muggle ruler a wizard himself? (Or witch herself; Milo neither knew nor particularly cared who was in charge on the Muggle side of things). Or had the magical government simply planted some false evidence, and memories, in front of the right people to make them take the steps they'd wanted?

All that was quite irrelevant, of course. Milo didn't know what role Sirius Black was to play in whatever Voldemort's evil scheme was going to be this year (he always seemed to have one), but it had nothing to do with his problem at the moment: getting onto the Hogwarts Express, and getting to Hogwarts, despite being pursued by the DMLE. Why he was being pursued, he wasn't totally clear, but he very evidently was, which was what mattered in this case.

"Invisibility," he muttered as soon as he arrived, and disappeared from view.

"Hey," Hannah whispered.

"Yeah?" Milo whispered back.

"If you're invisible," Hannah said, "can you see when you close your eyes?"

Milo frowned. "No..." he said, though he couldn't figure out why that would be the case. If his eyelids were invisible, why couldn't he see with his eyes closed?

"Weird. I'm going to go find my parents and my luggage. I'll meet you in front of the train, okay?"

"Sounds like a plan," Milo said.

Hannah turned to leave, but froze. "Do you see that woman over there?" she asked, covertly pointing at a dishevelled-looking, dark-haired woman in a wrinkled man's shirt several sizes too large for her, whose sleeves looked like they'd been rolled up a half-dozen times just so her wrists could poke out. She had heavy bags under her eyes, and leaned against a pillar surreptitiously facing Platform Nine and Three-Quarters with a wooden cane within easy reach. "She was the one who came to talk to my family. She had a bunch of questions about you and if we knew where you'd been hiding. She's with the DMLE."

Milo narrowed his eyes and started counting the adjectives. "No, she isn't," he said. He'd seen her once before, when she'd arrested him in Harry's house—but she'd been in the uniform of the local city watch, then. What he hadn't ever seen before, however, was a random mook show up again, having apparently gained characteristics since then. Whoever this NPC was, she was clearly highly significant.

"How long do we have until the train leaves?" Milo asked.

"Uh..." Hannah consulted her wristwatch, "twenty minutes."

"Save me a seat," Milo said, and strolled towards the mysterious woman.

o—o—o—o

Fiona nearly jumped out of her skin when a piece of paper was pressed into her hand, despite the fact that there was no-one within five meters of her.

She reached into her bag and pulled out her well-worn copy of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, and read the note such that the book was hiding it from view—ironic, considering she'd first learned that trick to read the very same book hidden inside Principles of Maths 11 to keep it out of view of her teacher, Mrs. Haversham.

The note was written on a thick, heavy material that Fiona was surprised to find wasn't paper at all, but some sort of thin animal skin.

Walk slowly towards the corner by the door with the big red glowing EXIT sign. Come alone.

P.S. that came out more villainous than I'd intended.

Well... that wasn't creepy or anything.

If it hadn't been for the fact that whoever had given her the note had clearly used magic to do it—nobody could sneak up on her like that—she'd assume that following the instructions would be walking right into a mugging. Most likely, whoever it was was simply going to erase her memory again, which was something Fiona was willing to risk, seeing as how she'd already written the day's events in a journal, and was wearing a wire to boot. Nevertheless, it was a decidedly creepy thing to do, giving someone a note like that out of the blue.

Curiosity overcame common sense, and she decided to follow the note's directions.

The corner the note mentioned was as good as one could find in such a public place for a secret meeting. It was out of direct line of sight both of the entrance and of Platform Nine and 'Three-Quarters,' and one of the lights nearby seemed to have burnt out, shading it in a modicum of darkness.

She was hardly there for a second before a boy appeared beside her. He was wearing black robes with a silver trim and an honest-to-goodness Batman-esque utility belt, complete with dozens of pouches. A massive brown and white rat sat on his shoulder, mimicking his expression disconcertingly.

"Milo," Fiona said, nodding. She didn't remember their last encounter, but her own notes mentioned that she'd managed to handily subdue him with a billy club, and he didn't have his wand out. She shifted her weight, and her grip on her cane. She didn't have her billy club this time, but she did have two-and-a-half feet of solid wood, which was at least as good.

"You know my name?" Milo asked. "Who are you?"

Fiona shrugged. "Someone inquisitive," she said.

"That is spectacularly unhelpful," Milo said. "Look, I recognize you from Little Whinging, unless you have an identical twin, and—wait. Do you have an identical twin? If so, we should probably get that whole misunderstanding out of the way sooner, rather than later. Dramatic irony is fun and all, but it isn't terribly productive."

Fiona shook her head, somewhat bewildered. This wasn't how she expected this meeting to go at all. In her mind, this strange wizard child had always been something of an evil mastermind, manipulating events behind the scenes. But she was fast facing the possibility that he really was as mad as the Daily Prophet had made him out to be. "No, I don't have a twin," she said.

"Great. Anyway, look, I'll just cut to the Initiative roll here: why were you pretending to be with the Ministry? And what's your interest in Hannah Abbot?"

"Why do you think I'm only pretending to be with the Ministry?" Fiona asked.

"Because you're with the city watch..." Milo frowned. "Unless you're a witch who was pretending to be a Muggle? Honestly, I hadn't considered that."

Fiona simply shrugged. She didn't know where this conversation was going, but it seemed like keeping Milo off-guard would only work in her favour. "Now, I have a question for you: why did you attack that family in Little Whinging?"

"Who, them?" Milo asked. "Uh... they were being pretty awful to a friend of mine."

"Harry Potter?" Fiona asked. She'd read a lot about this 'Boy Who Lived' in the books she'd bought from Diagon Alley. Apparently he was viewed as some sort of saviour-slash-minor-messiah-type-character by the magical community after he somehow defeated an improbably-named hardened criminal as a baby.

"Yeah," Milo said. Then his eyes narrowed. "What's your interest in Harry?" The boy shook his hands free of his sleeves and flexed his fingers in a way not unlike a gunslinger from a Western. Despite his lack of wand, Fiona recognized his body language: the boy clearly considered himself armed and dangerous.

"None," Fiona said honestly. "Though if there was some sort of abuse going on, there are steps I can take."

Milo shrugged. "I already took care of it."

"You mean threatening his aunt and uncle at swordpoint?" Fiona asked.

"Pretty much," he said, not, apparently, much caring that he'd as good as confessed to a crime. "Detect Object: Wand," the boy muttered under his breath.

Fiona tensed. The boy had said it in the rote, slightly sing-songy way of a memorized, oft-repeated phrase that's meaning was quite devoid of the actual words said. She was pretty certain, in short, that he'd cast a spell—without a wand.

"You're no witch," Milo said. "How did a Muggle like you even find out that the Department of Magical Law Enforcement exists? What's your angle, watchwoman?"

"I just want answers," Fiona said. "How did the magical government arrange for the British police to hunt for Sirius Black? Why did those wizards and witches steal those kids from Hogwarts? Why weren't they arrested by your government? If they're at large, where are they?"

Milo blinked. "You mean Sean, Dean, Thomas and them?"

"Yes," Fiona said. "Although I think Dean and Thomas are actually the same person."

"How do you even know about them?" Milo asked.

"I was part of the police raid that saved them," Fiona said. "Good men and women died that day." And so did my career.

"Lockhart saved them," Milo said. "He fought the Death Eaters off single-handedly. It was all over the papers, Hannah said." Hah, Fiona thought. I knew that girl was in cahoots with him.

"Death Eaters," Fiona said. "Was that who they were? Aren't they what's-his-face's criminal gang?"

"You could call them that," Milo said. "Are you saying that Lockhart lied about saving them?"

"Was that the golden-haired Kenneth Branagh-lookalike?" Fiona said. "Yeah. He took the credit, and my memories." She'd had to do a good bit of investigation to figure that one out; one of the nurses said she saw someone who looked a bit like Hamlet in the halls, and asked for an autograph. It was the first time she'd ever seen a suspect sign their real name during the act.

"Do you mean to tell me that you went up against a gaggle of Death Eaters and won?" Milo asked. "I wish I'd seen Lucius's face when he heard that news," Milo said dreamily. "No wonder they let the story about Lockhart get out; if anything, it's less embarrassing that way."

"Lucius?" Fiona asked. "Lucius Malfoy?" He appeared in the Prophet frequently as a wealthy philanthropist, giving money freely to charitable causes—and, now that Fiona thought about it, probably a certain magical news media corporation, as well.

"Yeah, he's basically their leader," Milo shrugged. "Well, he was until You-Know-Who came back. I imagine that shook things up a bit." The boy glanced up at the large clock on the wall. "Well, I'm out of time. This conversation was interesting, but ultimately unhelpful. I was hoping for more, I don't know, clues. Plot hooks. I guess that Lockhart thing could be relevant. Invisibility."

Without any drama or special effects, Milo vanished from sight.

"Wait!" Fiona said. "I don't know who!" But it was to no avail; the boy was gone.

Despite what the strange boy seemed to think, though, this conversation was highly profitable—just not for him, maybe. Because now she had a name.

Lucius Malfoy...

o—o—o—o

Milo slipped through the solid-seeming wall at Platform Nine and Three-Quarters just as the Hogwarts Express started it's... Milo's mind blanked on the technical terminology. It was doing the thing where it made a lot of noise just before it started moving. The doors had already shut.

"Dimension Door," Milo muttered, and suddenly he was in the train's central hallway.

He strolled down the hallways, glancing through the windows into the compartments, until he found Hannah. The seat next to her was empty, and Neville sat across from her.

"Hey," Milo said.

Hannah jumped. "Milo! Don't sneak up on people like that!"

"Sorry," Milo said. He'd forgotten he was still invisible, and dismissed the spell. "Did I miss anything?"

"Nope," Hannah said.

"It's the Hogwarts Express," Neville said. "What could possibly happen?"

Milo nodded his agreement to that, and sat down next to Hannah. "So I take it you don't think I'm a lunatic feral child?" he asked.

Neville shrugged. "You saved me from poison back in first year," he said. "You're fine in my books, even if you were raised by wolves."

Milo grinned, and leaned back, ready to enjoy a lengthy and uneventful trip.

As Hannah had said—it was the Hogwarts Express. What could possibly happen?