Chapter Seventeen: Stones and Windows

It was evening, just after the Sorting Ceremony, and Milo lay against a tree by the lake. Milo had arrived at the tailing end of it, missing most of the actual Sorting, but hearing what passed for Snape's speech.

Milo heard soft footsteps approaching, making quiet crunching noises in the frosty earth. He didn't look up; he knew who it was.

"I thought I might find you out here," Hannah said. "Your hidden classroom was blown to pieces at some point. I'm guessing it was a surprise left for you by… the other you?"

Milo nodded. At some point last year, Riddle had apparently left Explosive Runes on the door to the classroom behind the giant tree that Milo usually used when he needed a secret area. Frankly, with his hit points being the way they were, Milo was lucky to have survived.

"Mind if I sit down?"

Milo shrugged, fingering a smooth, round stone in his hand.

"Whacha got there?"

Despite his mood, Milo flashed a quick grin. "Halfling skipping rock."

"Ooookay…"

"Halfling culture is inexplicably built around throwing rocks," Milo said. "They get all kinds of random racial bonuses to it, and a handful of race-specific feats. I bet, if I looked long enough, I could find a Halfling-only Prestige Class built entirely around throwing rocks."

Hannah settled into the grass. She'd learned that there was no point interrupting him when he was doing one of his Milo-y things.

"All of this is to say that when Halflings say that a rock is a good skipping rock, they know what they're about." Milo held the rock up into the light. "This one was probably ground down into an aerodynamically-perfect shape by Halfling children over the course of six months, or something. I found it in my sister's Belt of Hidden Pouches."

He gave it one last look, then flung it out over the lake at a shallow angle. It hit the water heavily and sank with an anti-climactic splash.

"Or maybe it was just an ordinary pebble Relkin picked up one day," Milo said. He coughed awkwardly. "I probably should have checked if that was magical before I threw it," he said ruefully. "For all I know, that was a Philosopher's Stone."

"Look, Milo," Hannah said. "I know sometimes that when I'm in a lousy mood, I want nothing more than to sit by myself and throw rocks into a lake. But late as you were, you heard what Headmaster Snape said at the Sorting Ceremony: we're not supposed to leave the castle. There's Dementors patrolling the grounds. That one on the Hogwarts Express did a real number on you. I think it focused on us because…" she lowered her voice. "I think they could… smell, or sense or whatever… him on us."

"Who says I'm in a lousy mood?" Milo asked, throwing another rock, this time an ordinary one, into the lake. It didn't skip, either. "Who says I even get moods? And if a Dementor does try something, I'll kick its shrouded ass from here back to Azkaban. I'm a Wizard. Not just any Wizard—a Conjurer. Of cheap tricks, no less."

"Right," Hannah said. "Because you never compensate for your own insecurities with reckless bravado."

Milo didn't have much to say to that, so he threw another rock into the lake instead without any more success than the others.

"Fine," Hannah said. She sat there silently next to him for a few minutes, watching him ineffectually throw rocks into the water. "You need to give it more spin," she said, finally.

"What?" Milo asked.

"Spin. Use your index finger to spin it as you throw." She picked up a rock, seemingly at random, and flung it effortlessly into the lake. It skipped three times. "I actually like my skipping rocks slightly oblong, because it's easier to spin them."

Milo shook his head. "Technique won't make any difference for me." He paused. "Well, that's not true. It's more accurate to say that I can't improve my technique without fighting and increasing in level. It's just a die roll, my Dexterity bonus, and half my level."

"Just try it," Hannah said. "Here, use this one." She passed him a muddy, irregular rock. The ancient Halfling rock-skipping gurus of old would roll in their graves looking at it.

Milo rolled his eyes, but took it.

"Get down low, close to the water. You want it to hit as close to parallel to the surface as you can."

"I know, I know," Milo said. "It's not like it's grapple mechanics."

"And spin it," Hannah reminded him.

"I was spinning it," Milo lied. He adjusted his grip the way Hannah showed him, bent down low, and flung it out over the water.

It skipped once, half-heartedly, then dropped into the water without ceremony.

But it did skip.

Milo could only see one side of Hannah's face, but he felt it safe to extrapolate, using his arcane knowledge and unparalleled intellect, that she was smirking on the other side, too. "Could have just been that I rolled a 20," Milo muttered.

"Uh-huh," Hannah said. "So, do you want to talk about it?"

"Talk about what?" Milo asked. "I'm a soulless construct. A collection of bonuses and penalties. I am without emotion." He skipped another rock. "And they'd only hold me back, even if I had them."

"You know that's not true," Hannah said. "So I'm not going to dignify the point with an argument."

Once more, Milo didn't have a heck of a lot to say, so he threw another rock into the lake. This time, he skipped twice. Hannah did the same, though her rock didn't so much skip as glide along the surface of the lake for a few meters before finally sinking.

"They thought I summoned the Basilisk," Milo said eventually. He didn't need to say who 'they' were.

"Yeah," Hannah said.

"They thought that maybe the Prophet got a few things right."

Hannah simply nodded.

"They think I'm dangerous," Milo said.

Hannah smiled. "All of those things are true, you realize. You did summon the Basilisk—unwillingly. The Prophet was right about a few things—again, mostly things you did unwillingly or accidentally. And you are dangerous." Milo had a brief memory of blood-red snow, but pushed it away. "You're among the most dangerous people in the world—top ten, top hundred at the least—to the bad guys. To people that want to destabilize the world, to persecute Muggles, Muggleborns, half-bloods, and anyone else who gets in their way. To people who hurt innocents because it's convenient. You're so dangerous, I bet you keep them up at night with a cold sweat."

"Didn't stop You-Know-Who from killing me," Milo muttered. "After using my power for evil. Maybe Hermione was right."

"You came back," Hannah said. "You conquered death. Nobody's done that before. Ever. You-Know-Who tried to do that his entire life, and it didn't work. Not really. And that probably scares him more than anything. But that's not what this is about, is it?"

Milo sighed. "They didn't trust me, Hannah. Harry, Ron, Hermione. They didn't talk to me. They didn't even look at me." He picked up a rock to skip, but set it back down instead. "It's so stupid. Why should I care? My friends believed the overwhelming mountain of evidence over… I don't know. Their unfounded, vague feelings of faith in me. Why should I be surprised by that? It's perfectly rational." He laughed grimly. "Wait till they find out I'm harbouring—" he glanced around, remembering Hannah's warning about Dementors. "Well, you know." He sighed. "Gods, I sound like such a Hufflepuff."

"There's worse things in life than Hufflepuffs," Hannah said. "You want a piece of advice?"

"No," Milo said.

Hannah ignored him. "Don't stew on it. Hermione tends to follow her brain over her gut, and she's had half a year to convince Harry and Ron. She can be very persuasive. But even she'll come around eventually, and they'll follow. You're not a bad person, and they'll see that."

"You're probably right," Milo agreed, though he knew it would probably take a while for that to sink in completely.

"Now, we should probably go inside," Hannah said. "Snape's just looking for excuses to dock points from Gryffindors, and that's not even getting to the fact that a Dementor could stumble across us at any minute."

"Good idea," Milo agreed. Just as he turned to leave, however, a thought struck him. "One second," Milo said. He picked up the most ungainly rock he could find—it was almost as big as his head, and lumpier than a troll's nose. It was probably the least aerodynamically-sound shape possible. "True Strike," he muttered, then flung it over his shoulder behind him as he walked towards the castle.

Splash-splash-splash-splash-splash-splash-splash…

"Cheater," Hannah laughed, and followed him.

o—o—o—o

Fiona couldn't sleep.

She was back in her own flat and out of cheap motels, but somehow, the normality of her own bed seemed unfamiliar. Sprocket, her enormously fat calico cat, was cutting off circulation to her lower body and purring like a chainsaw. Sprocket had no conception of the secret wizarding underground community that flagrantly flouted the laws of the land, with its secret laws and secret courts and secret police. And its own secret underground criminal organization of black-robed, Ringwraith-wannabe, 'dark' wizards and witches. As if the regular, memory-stealing witches and wizards weren't bad enough.

Her answering machine had been full of messages when she'd returned. The higher-ups down at the station wanted to talk about how she missed her mandatory counselling. Her mother wanted to know what she'd been up to lately, and why she hadn't called. Her landlord said her rent was past due.

Fiona rolled over, sending a disgruntled Sprocket rolling onto her back. The cat shot her a dirty look and sauntered off out of the bedroom, likely in search of any food Fiona might have left lying around the evening before.

None of it made any sense. She wasn't even sure why she was still digging at this. Once, she might have harboured illusions that she could simply find whoever was at the top of the little wizard community, cuff them, bring them round to the station, and be rid of all of this. But there didn't seem to be any one person who was the lynchpin of the secret underground magical world. It was systemic. Undefeatable.

Even if she did manage to arrest the people responsible for taking her memories, she couldn't very well charge them with anything. Nothing that would stand up in court, anyway. And if it miraculously did, no prison could hold a wizard or witch, anyway. Even without a wand, there was nothing stopping one of their mates from just popping in, snatching them, and popping out again with no-one the wiser. Or mind-controlling the prison guards. Or the judge and jury, for that matter.

Not that it would ever get that far, because this whole Sirius Black thing revealed that the Muggle government was co-operating with the wizarding one at some level. God, she hated that word. Muggle. Why did non-magical people need a special name? They were just ordinary people.

Fiona rolled over again to try to get comfortable, but only succeeded in tangling her face in her hair, which was getting way too long. When was the last time she'd got it cut? For that matter, when was the last time she'd washed it?

A faint creak pulled her out of her reverie, followed by a sort of quiet mechanical noise that Fiona didn't immediately recognize. She frowned, and pulled herself out of bed.

"Sprocket?" she murmured.

"—certain this is the correct hovel?" asked a voice like silk slick with oil. Fiona froze—someone was in her flat. The sound earlier must have been her lock being jimmied.

(And they called it a hovel. Who the heck does that?)

"Number 36, master. Just as it says in the Muggles' file," said a second voice, this one low and raspy. Well, that settled any doubt in her mind about who it might be: wizards. Were they here to take her memories again?

Fiona thought about her options. There were only two ways out of her bedroom—the door to her little living room-slash-kitchen, and the window to the street, three storeys below.

"What was that?" said a third voice, this one she did recognize: Alecto Carrow. The witch who'd spotted her in Diagon Alley earlier.

Meaning these weren't Ministry goons, and they weren't after her memories. Fiona crept towards the window. She'd only barely got away from these guys last time, and she didn't want to risk it again—especially not with anyone who they deemed worth calling 'master.' Probably this Malfoy guy that that kid told me about, she thought to herself. Was this revenge for the taxman thing?

"It was just a cat," said the oily voice.

The faint light shining through the crack in her bedroom door flashed red, and for a moment, Fiona's blood turned to ice.

Sprocket. She'd gone into the living room.

Red means stun, right?

She thought of her stupid, fat, needy cat in the hands of those lunatics turned her fear into anger.

It'd better mean stun.

"There's a second room," said the one with the oily voice. "She must be in there. Alecto, stay here and cover the door."

Fiona frantically fiddled with her window's latch, trying to get it to open. The blasted thing was older than dirt, and had been painted over at some point in the past.

She heard footsteps approach her door.

Finally, the latch gave, and Fiona shoved the window open. The nighttime chill cut through her flannel pajamas

"Did you hear that?"

Fiona practically leapt through the open window, grabbing the brick sill with her cold hands. She'd originally intended to climb down to the street, or even jump, but one glance downwards put paid to that plan. It was solid concrete below her (save for a spiky, ironwork-and-brick fence, which was less than heartening) and, aside from the little decorative brick rim running between the windows of her flat, there was nothing to grab onto to climb down. Besides, she wasn't about to leave her cat in the hands of these psychos. Instead, she shimmied along the crumbly brick sill towards the window in her living room. Behind her, she heard the door to her bedroom open fully as the two wizards entered.

She risked a glance up through the window, and saw a robed, masked witch—presumably Alecto—holding a still Sprocket by one paw, poking her with her wand.

Fiona took a deep breath, shifted her weight entirely onto one quickly-numbing hand, and knocked once on the window with the other before grabbing the sill again. She heard a soft thump that she guessed was Sprocket being put down (Fiona winced internally at her poor choice of words), before realizing that she'd staked her entire chances of survival on a move inspired by a comic book she'd read when she was thirteen, and was just contemplating how mind-bogglingly stupid that was, and if it was too late to risk the fall, when the window opened.

Alecto stuck her head out with her wand held out in front of her, which just went to show that dark witches didn't read nearly enough Batman as kids.

Fiona shifted her left hand into a more secure position by reaching through the now-open window and grabbing the ledge on the other side, then yanked Alecto by the front of her robes with her right hand and pulled as hard as she could, transferring as much of her weight as she could to the masked witch.

Alecto yelped as she tumbled out the window. Fiona let her drop—not that she had a lot of choice; if she'd held on she'd just get pulled down with her—and climbed herself up into her living room.

She sprinted forwards, scooping Sprocket up from where she lay on the floor, and out into the hall. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a bright green flash, but seeing as how she didn't immediately die, she ignored it and kept running. She heard footsteps behind her, but didn't waste time looking around. Either they'd catch her or they wouldn't, but either way, she had no intention of slowing down.

On her way to the stairs—there wasn't a snowball's chance that she was going to wait for a lift with a pair of bloody evil sorcerers after her—she pulled the fire alarm.

Stale water poured down around her to put out the imaginary fires as she ran down the spiralling stairs. More importantly for her plans, however, were the dozens of panicked Muggles (there was that word again—it was creeping into her own mind) who came running out of their rooms in varying states of undress, some clutching valuables, others still pulling on dressing gowns. Fiona wasn't the only one with a pet—one couple was trying to get their confused golden retriever to follow them outside—though she was the only one with twenty-five pounds of soaking wet, catatonic cat clutched to her chest.

By the time Fiona reached the exit, she was already part of a growing mob of people fleeing the building. Secrecy seemed to be pretty important to these wizarding types, so she guessed her pursuers wouldn't try to make a move on her while she was in such a public gathering.

There was no sign of Alecto on the ground outside, so Fiona guessed she'd either landed in such a way as to be able to walk away, or had used magic somehow to slow her descent.

From there, it was a simple matter to disappear into the night, cat held tight to her chest, shivering in her soaked clothes.

o—o—o—o

Milo sat by himself in the Gryffindor Common Room with Thamior's really incredibly gross, bound-in-human-flesh spellbook in front of him. Everyone else had long since gone to sleep, but Milo still had work to do. Mordy sat across from him on the table, listening intently.

"This is going to be a problem," Milo said. "The spells in this book are, with a few exceptions, pretty much garbage. And touching it makes my Alignment shiver."

"So why don't you make a new one?" Mordy asked. He already knew the answer, of course, but he understood that his job right now was to be a sounding board (without sounding bored). This was by far better than most jobs wizards found for their familiars (which tended to be triggering traps from afar, or delivering close-range spells to dangerous monsters), so he decided to throw himself at it wholeheartedly.

Milo shuddered. "It takes a solid twenty-four hours to copy a spell from one book to another," he said. "And a hundred pieces of gold per spell level. And it takes weeks to research spells not present in the book. I don't have time for that."

"But you get two free spells added to your book every time you level up," Mordy said. "There's always the—"

"Ugh," Milo said. "Not the Dementor plan." Keeping a trapped Dementor to bump Milo down to just below the level up threshold in a controlled environment, so he could repeatedly level and de-level, was just too dangerous for the payoff. Not to mention that it would be hellish to experience.

"I don't see what the big problem is," Mordy said. "As long as your old spellbook still exists—which it does, wherever it is—you can just use your Uncanny Forethought to cast spells from it spontaneously. And there's always Spontaneous Divination, which lets you switch any spell you have prepared for a Divination spell, whether or not it's in your book."

"Divination spells won't fight off dark wizards," Milo said. "And Uncanny Forethought only works a handful of times per day. It's not enough." No villain Milo had ever before encountered had been low enough to take his spellbook away from him, so he hadn't really had any precautions in place for this event. It just wasn't done. "Maybe I should start tattooing spells to my body," Milo said. "I think there were rules for that somewhere."

"Complete Arcane, if I'm not mistaken," Mordy added helpfully.

"Right," Milo said. What were the rules for that again? He really should have taken the opportunity to drop by a bookstore in Myra (city of Light! City of Magic!) to purchase the most recent set of splatbooks available. The great western coasts near the City were dotted with colleges and towers full of Wizards working round-the-clock to push back the limits of the known rules of the universe. One of them, somewhere, was probably working hard to publish an updated version of the way tower shields, hiding, and cover interacted after Milo forced the hand of the gods in his raid on the palace.

"But you probably don't want to do that," Mordy cautioned.

"Why not?" Milo asked.

"Werrrrrllllll," Mordy said. "Let's just say, for the sake of argument, that You-Know-Who, having lived in your brain and knowing your weaknesses, chose to find and destroy your spellbook to keep you from refreshing your spells every day. If the spells were in a book, well, he'd just burn the book. But if it was written into your own skin…"

"…ugh," Milo said. "Consider your point made. Any day in which no-one tries to flay me is a good day." He sighed. "If only I could figure out how Riddle made that sentient book thingy. Then I could have a spellbook that could reconfigure itself into whatever spells I wanted. That would be so cool."

"Might as well wish to be able to do magic with a wand," Mordy said. "I think you'll just have to live with Thamior's spellbook for now, until you can figure out a way to locate what he did with your old one."

Milo resisted the urge to bash his forehead against the table. De-levelled and without a spellbook? "Maybe I had it backwards," he said. "Maybe this is the afterlife. I died, and I'm in Wizard Hell."

"Cheer up, boss," Mordy said. "Look at the silver lining. You can take this opportunity to more carefully think about your choices you made when you levelled up. How many people can say they got to hit Level Nine twice?"

Milo shrugged. "I guess I could probably rethink my choice of Feat," he admitted.

"…and Prestige Class?" Mordy suggested.

"Why would I do that?" Milo asked. "Rainbow Servant is fantastic. No prerequisites worth noting, no lost caster levels—remember, the text overrides the table, and despite what the table says (and the designers intended), the text clearly states you get spellcasting every level—and I get a couple random abilities. Nothing fantastic until tenth level, of course, but practically anything is better than going straight Wizard. A bonus Item Creation or Metamagic Feat every five levels does not count as a Class Feature. Wizards don't get anything else."

Mordy coughed, which was quite a feat in-and-of-itself, seeing as how rats, generally speaking, can't. "Nothing?"

"Nope," Milo shrugged. "Nothing."

Mordy rolled his eyes. "Oh, come on. Your Familiar—i.e., me—gets new abilities if you level up in Wizard!"

"Pffft," Milo said. "Better armour class? If it seriously comes down to that, we're already both dead. And what else—oh, yeah. Spell Resistance. Need I remind you that I'm the only person in this entire universe that your Spell Resistance would protect you against? Which conflicts with the only other thing, that being the ability for me to cast Scrying on you for free now and then."

"Don't forget the ability to talk to other rats," Mordy added.

Milo rolled his eyes in a manner eerily similar to how Mordy had done a moment ago. "The only other rat around here is Scabbers," Milo said. "And I can't imagine you'd want to hear anything he has to say."

"But—"

"Don't make me order you to go patrolling for remaining hidden Explosive Runes," Milo threatened. Mordy sighed, and dropped the issue.

o—o—o—o

"She got away," Lucius Malfoy said. It wasn't a question.

He surveyed the crowd outside. In a few minutes, the Muggles authorities would arrive, and they'd search the building.

"I bloody well know she bloody well bloody got a-bloody-way," Alecto muttered. "She threw me out the bloody window!"

"She took her cat with her, too," Avery added.

"Shame," Alecto said, hefting an iron poker from the fireplace. "Amycus's guitar—" As she spoke, she smashed a china teapot sitting on the mantle on the off chance that it was an antique. "—needs new strings."

"I think it may be safe to say that we underestimated her," Lucius admitted. "Amycus—"

"I'm Alecto," Alecto corrected, gathering as many treasured family photos as she could find and dumping them into the fireplace, which she lit with her wand.

"Actually, I meant to say Avery. My apologies." Lucius said. Why must all of my followers have names that begin with the same letter? I'd bet Dumbledore never has this problem. "Would you search this… residence… for anything that looks like a diary or notebook?" Lucius frowned. The Ministry would have done that the last time they'd erased her memory, as would Lockhart. "Actually, instead, locate any Muggle device that has a purpose you don't recognize and pile it somewhere out of the water. We'll Apparate it out with us when we're done." It stood to reason that the usual tricks to keep her memory erased hadn't worked. She had to have done something that was beyond the capabilities of the Obliviators to understand.

"Er… of course," Avery said, clearly not understanding, but complying nevertheless.

Alecto located a filing cabinet full of what she guessed was critically important, difficult-to-replace documentation—things like tax records, insurance information, identification, a birth certificate—and set that on fire, too.

"Oh, Alecto, do stop that," Lucius said. "It's unprofessional."

"I'm going to skin her alive," Alecto muttered, smashing some sort of martial arts trophy into dust with the iron rod. "Then I'll give her Polyjuice and turn her back into herself so I can do it again."

"Alecto—" Lucius frowned. Did Polyjuice work that way? He'd have to write Snape and ask.

"She threw me out a window!" Alecto snarled. "So don't tell me not to have a little revenge!"

Lucius rolled his eyes. "Alecto, there's no point in destroying her possessions—"

Alecto rounded on Lucius, teeth clenched, ready to fight.

"—because we're burning this place to the ground when we're done," Lucius finished. There were a few marginally pragmatic reasons for this, such as covering their tracks and inconveniencing his enemy. But none of those were the reason why he was doing this.

"Oh," Alecto paused. A series of emotions flashed across her face, not all of which Lucius recognized, and, of those, some of which he wished he had not. "Good."

The simple fact of it was that, with Bellatrix around again, he needed the Death Eaters on his side. An occasional act of arson now and again was a small price to pay to ensure Alecto's loyalty.

"We'll find her," Lucius said. "But for now, we'll go to the next Muggle on the list."