Chapter 127. The Arrival of the Aurors.
Severus sat on a bench not far from the battle site, calmly picking through Nestor's memories. Nestor, who had prostrated himself before him, was the head of the first group within the Steel division of the Black Star organization, which ran operations across Northeastern Europe. His subordinates lay scattered nearby, their chests rising and falling steadily enough to confirm they were alive. Severus had never seen much point in killing people once the fight had gone out of them. Had they attacked him while he was walking with Bella, he would have been considerably less charitable. He had other plans for them entirely, and he was quite certain none of them would ever see daylight again.
The Magister was no small fish. The man knew everything worth knowing: the capabilities of each division head, the location of every base. There was only one gap in his knowledge, and that was the identity of the organization's leader. Whoever sat at the top never showed his face, not even to the six division heads. Every order came through intermediaries, and those intermediaries could be anything: a stray dog, a cat, a Muggle under the Imperius Curse, even another mage. The man was fanatically careful.
The Steel division had come to Britain with Vitold at the helm, a Magister whose specialty was plant magic, and they had arrived with a clear list of objectives. The first was to embed themselves into the country quietly, then hollow out the Ministry, slotting their people into every vacancy until, eventually, one of them sat in the Minister's chair. The timing was ideal for that kind of patient infiltration. The second was to claim the criminal underworld of magical Britain, which had been left largely ownerless after the disappearance of almost every established group, and to find out why. The third was to get their hands on the recipes for certain potions made exclusively in Britain, chief among them the Strength potion, which was currently responsible for the lion's share of the country's magical trade.
That last one surprised Severus more than anything. He had given the recipes six months before they leaked. It had been over a year, and no one had cracked them. A diluted version existed, but it was nowhere near the real thing.
The other goals were not unreasonable, either. If Black Star kept feeding resources to the Death Eaters and using them to bleed the Aurors dry, the Ministry would eventually start hiring anyone with a pulse, turning a blind eye to criminal records and worse. The talent threshold would collapse.
As for the underworld, they had come in slightly too late. Several new gangs had already carved the territory into seven pieces. Stitching that together would take real muscle, and four hundred men simply was not enough. Waiting on reinforcements from the continent would take months they did not have.
Still, the ambition was not stupid. Britain was wounded, and wounded countries were the ones worth taking. The methods were sound, the plan was solid, and Severus found himself with nothing to do but appreciate the mind behind it, whoever that was.
The problem was straightforward. Their plan had started brushing up against his, and he had only just gotten himself properly settled. Targeting him had been their worst mistake, because Vitold had not been interested in a conversation. He had wanted the recipes extracted. The authorship was no secret: everyone in the magical world knew the Strength potion and its companions had been developed by a Hogwarts seventh-year named Severus Prince. Ministry protection had kept the more aggressive approaches at bay, but people still turned up at Shafiq's shop every single day trying to buy the formulas.
So he had decided to get involved, infiltrate under Ihiros's identity, and thoroughly disrupt Black Star's schedule.
A few minutes later, he lifted his hand from Nestor's head. When someone opened their mind voluntarily, finding what you needed took almost no effort at all.
"Not bad. Not bad at all. Clever man, your leader." The old man let out a slow, dry chuckle as he looked at the short-haired gray man in spectacles, who flinched at every syllable. His hood had fallen back, and Severus could see his face clearly now. The Tyrant, they called him, and looking at those harsh, cold features, it was easy to understand why. The name suited him far less well at that particular moment, given that he was shaking like a man in a winter river.
"..."
"Right. Thank you for the information. Now what do I do with you?"
"Please, don't kill me!" Nestor blurted, his voice cracking with panic as he pressed his forehead to the ground.
"Hmm." A pause. "All right." Nestor's face lit up at once. "I'll spare your life. But I can't let you walk away. You've seen far too much. However..." He glanced up, caught sight of the two red points of light, swallowed, and quickly looked away. "...if you're willing to serve my student..."
"I'm ready! Make me your slave, please!" Standing before him was something barely human, possibly the most powerful mage alive. To be the slave of such a creature was not a humiliation. It was a prize. Nestor had never been motivated by ideology or loyalty to any cause. He wanted power, pure and simple, power for himself alone. And if he could earn even a scrap of this man's teaching, if he could learn how to push past his own limits and reach something approaching that kind of strength, then calling himself a slave was a very small price.
"Your brain works. Good." Severus had read the man in seconds, no Legilimency required. That particular look, hungry and calculating all at once, had been common in his old world. There, almost everyone eventually wore that expression. "Show me your chest."
The man didn't hesitate for a moment. He knew exactly what was being asked. He stripped off his cloak, wrenched his tie loose, and tore his shirt open without a second's concern for the buttons scattering across the ground.
Severus looked at the black star tattooed in the center of the man's chest. He reached out and touched it with one finger, and calmly reworked its shape into a black flame. As he did, he adjusted the underlying mechanism, reshaping it into a slave seal on the same model as José's.
"Go to the shop and show them that mark. You'll be guarding it from now on as well."
"Yes! Thank you! I swear I won't disappoint you!" Nestor bowed several more times. A dismissive flick of the hand sent him to his feet. He grabbed the staff from the ground, struck it down hard, and was gone.
"Another guard acquired. Perhaps I really should open a second shop." The thought drifted through Severus's mind, accompanied by a mental picture of all the clutter still piled in the Room of Requirement. He looked down at the heap of wizards by the tree, got to his feet, and walked over. "Better tidy their memories before the cavalry arrives."
A few minutes later, flashes of light erupted at the far edge of the park, and several dozen Aurors materialized. They spread out immediately, moving efficiently, beginning to wipe the memories of the Muggles who hadn't yet fled.
"First group, with me," barked a man with a magical eye and a head of thick gray hair, his wand already in his fist, his eyes fixed grimly on the column of smoke still rising from the scorched earth.
"Yes, Captain!" Ten voices answered as one.
They reached the site quickly. The fire was still burning, the ground charred black in patches, the marks of the fight plain enough for anyone who knew what to look for.
The rest of the Aurors gaped. Their captain did not. He kept his magical eye on the familiar flame and said nothing, because he had seen it once before, though on a smaller scale.
Then the eye snapped sideways. A few seconds later, it locked onto a cloaked figure sitting quietly on a bench, watching them with mild interest. The captain swallowed. The cave. He still had not managed to fully forget that day, or the absolute certainty that he was about to die in it.
He swallowed again. He remembered the meeting held the morning after the raid on the Death Eater base, the one that had ended with the entire facility incinerated by a single fire spell. Every senior member of Magical Law Enforcement, Magical Accidents and Catastrophes, and Magical Intelligence had been there. The message had been simple: one wizard was entirely off-limits, under any and all circumstances, unless he moved first. Treat him with respect. And that wizard was sitting on a park bench right now, watching the Aurors mill about with the expression of a man who had nothing better to do.
"Merlin's beard. Why is it always me?" The captain's legs had turned to rubber, but he made himself walk forward. He clocked the pile of bodies by the tree and filed that away for later. The old man first.
"Not exactly rushing, were you?" Ihiros drawled, a slow smirk tugging at his mouth as the nervous Auror came to a stop in front of him.
"Good afternoon, Mister Ihiros. I'm Captain—"
"Skip the introduction. I'm really not that important."
"Tell that to my superiors. Tell that to every gang you left as a pile of ash." Moody snarled the words aloud, but his mind churned with far darker thoughts. His face, however, arranged itself into an expression that, over the past decade, fewer than five people had ever seen on it: a smile. That was precisely why his own people had two names for him. Mad-Eye was the official one. Moody Moody was the other. "Could you tell me what happened here?"
"Gladly. Those men by the tree went after my student. I had to intervene. What I'd like is for your people to handle the case and not come down on him for defending himself."
"Of course. We'll go through everything properly and see everyone involved locked up."
"Good. It's rare anyone bothers to help an old man these days..." Severus let out a heavy sigh. Moody's right eye twitched, but he kept every single thought behind his teeth. He had no interest whatsoever in becoming a scorch mark, and he was absolutely not going to think about scenic views or garden butterflies. "...in gratitude, a word of advice. Go through their heads carefully. You'll find it well worth the trouble."
"What...?" The man never finished the question. The old man crumbled into ash in front of him and scattered on the breeze. "...right. So I won't be home before tomorrow morning, then." He sighed, turned, and found his entire squad frozen in place, staring at him with the glassy expressions of people who had just watched something they could not process. "What in Merlin's name are you all standing around for?! Get the evidence cleared! Bodies! Blood! Move, or I will make next week something you spend the rest of your careers trying to forget! Well?!"
"Y-yes, sir!" That seemed to get through to them.
"Idiots," Moody muttered, the word carrying every ounce of the day's frustration. He went to the bodies, produced an iron box, loaded them into it, then turned back to watch his squad with an expression of profound professional despair. "Green recruits. Every single time. They'll put me in the ground."
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