"Uncle, what do you mean by-"
The green light answered before Robert did. The cousin dropped where he stood, dead before he hit the ground, eyes still open, still carrying the last half-second of confusion.
Robert looked down at him for a moment, then stepped over the body and walked into the house.
What followed was not a duel. It was not even a confrontation. The family had no frame for it, no way to see it coming, because the idea that the man returning to them was not Robert at all, not the Robert they had known, simply did not occur to anyone. He moved through the estate killing one person at a time, each spell clean and immediate, until someone stumbled onto a body and screamed, and the screaming brought others, and the others were enough to drive him back.
Robert's practical combat ability had never been exceptional. A cut above a standard Auror, but several combined adults pressing hard were more than he wanted to manage. After blasting through several walls and buying himself room to move, he fled the estate.
The crying that rose from the grounds afterward was uneven, grief arriving in waves as the survivors found what he had left behind.
Eight Graves family members dead. For an ordinary pure-blood family that would represent three generations of losses compressed into one afternoon. For the Graves, who had always been numerous and well-established, it was something that would take decades to recover from, if recovery was even possible. More, in fact, than had died at Tom's hands or Usagi's, and these were predominantly the younger generation. The line had been broken from within. Whatever future the Graves family might have built, it was smaller now, and getting smaller.
In the middle of it all, an old man moved slowly among the bodies, gathering them one by one.
Percival Graves.
His face carried grief, but grief was not the only thing in it. Something else was there too, something that the others, sunk deep in their own pain, did not notice. He said something under his breath that no one was close enough to hear.
"Better this way... saves me from having to do it myself... even now I couldn't bring myself to... but Robert's change... was that Riddle's doing..."
He carried the eight bodies toward the hill behind the estate, where the family's burial grounds had always been, one slow step at a time.
...
By the following morning the story had spread across wizarding North America entirely.
Robert Graves had lost his mind.
The first reaction, almost universally, was disbelief. The Graves family had standing. Robert had standing. This was the sort of thing that didn't happen. But the survivors confirmed it, one after another, because the family name meant nothing against what they had seen, and after collecting the bodies of the dead, those still breathing had crawled out through the gap in the wards, every one of them, while Usagi watched from above and made no move to stop them.
The International Confederation stripped Robert of his credentials within hours. MACUSA posted a bounty with a figure that made headlines.
Nobody pointed at Tom. Nobody even thought to. There was nothing magical to point to, which was the entire point. Robert had returned to North America with Akingbade in plain sight, his behaviour perfectly ordinary throughout, no trace of the Imperius Curse, no sign of compulsion that any diagnostic would catch. The accepted explanation, universally and immediately, was that the pressure of the family's accusations had simply broken something in him.
Percival was the only one who wondered. And Percival said nothing.
...
"That many?"
Usagi had returned to Tom's side once the task resolved itself, carrying news that hadn't yet crossed the Atlantic.
Tom was genuinely surprised. In his calculation, Robert would kill one or two people, be subdued, and the story would end there. Instead he had nearly reached double figures and still managed to escape.
The old man hadn't intervened. That was interesting.
Did he truly not care about the family, or was there something else behind it?
Tom turned it over for a minute, found no clear answer, and set it aside. The outcome was acceptable regardless. This had never been about revenge, not really. Robert had been a test subject for a new branch of magic, a method for silently destabilising a target's emotional control, nudging the currents of feeling until rational thought had nowhere left to stand. Compared to conventional spellwork it left no trace and offered almost no surface to defend against. The difficulty was in the calibration. Intensity and direction were hard to control precisely.
He wrote up his notes, organised them into a coherent record, and sent a copy to Ravenclaw. She could carry the research further from there.
He looked at his achievement points. Past a thousand again.
The temptation to pull another summon was there.
The figures in his learning space were not only teachers. They were a brain trust, a future research team. Even with a legendary immortal already in residence, the greatest minds of their respective centuries brought things that complemented rather than duplicated each other.
But he thought about it and decided against it.
A thousand points held in reserve for Ariana and Andros. That portion was untouchable. He would summon again when he had accumulated another full thousand on top of that. Not before.
He projected the last of the Black family's Dark magic notebooks into the learning space and left the library.
Kreacher was on the staircase landing, under Puck's close supervision, working a clean cloth along the banister with the careful, slightly resentful attention of someone who had been given very specific instructions about the standard expected. When Tom appeared at the bottom of the stairs, the old elf flinched, then straightened, and produced a greeting that was respectful if not enthusiastic.
"Good day, Master Riddle."
"Kreacher." Tom looked up at him. "Your young master, Regulus Black, gave you something to keep. A locket. A pendant on a chain."
Kreacher went blank for a moment.
Then his eyes filled with something that looked a great deal like terror.
"Don't lie to me. Sirius gave you an order on that subject."
The old elf's face moved through several expressions at once, obligation pulling against every instinct he had. "Yes... young master... young master gave Kreacher a locket to keep!"
"Give it to me."