Chapter 52:
– Harry –
The Jiangshi leader's command echoed through the cavern, and every single one of those hundreds of corpses lurched into motion at the same time.
Hundreds of rigid bodies hopping in unison on the polished marble floor.
"Fuck me, that's a lot of zombies!" Sirius shouted, and to his credit, his wand was already up and tracking before the last word left his mouth.
"They're not zombies, they're Jiangshi!" I corrected.
"They're dead and they're trying to eat us, that makes them zombies!" Sirius fired back with the ironclad logic of a man who did not have time for taxonomical debates.
The first wave surged up the carved steps toward our ledge, a wall of grasping claws and black-toothed grins, and Sirius met them head on.
He pointed his wand to the side and spoke an incantation I didn't recognize, something guttural and sharp and wrong-sounding in a way that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Pure black flames erupted from the tip of his stolen wand, not in the wild, animal-shaped chaos of Fiendfyre but in a controlled, rolling wave of fire so dark it seemed to eat the light around it rather than produce any of its own.
The flames swept across the front rank of Jiangshi like a tide of liquid shadow, and the undead screamed.
Dozens of them burned, their ancient burial robes disintegrating, their parchment skin blackening and peeling away from bone, their rigid bodies crumpling and collapsing into heaps of smoldering remains that choked the stairway with smoke and ash.
I watched Sirius work and felt something cold settle in the pit of my stomach.
That wasn't just dark magic. I could sense demonic taint coming from those flames, faint but unmistakable, the specific signature of power that had been touched by or channeled through something infernal at some point in its history. The fire felt almost tainted, cursed in a way that went beyond standard dark arts and into territory that raised questions I very much wanted answers to.
That's something to interrogate Sirius about later. Much later. When we're not about to be eaten by several hundred angry Chinese vampires.
My devil wings burst from my back in a flare of deep blue energy, the leathery membranes snapping taut as they caught the stale cavern air. I launched myself off the ledge and climbed fast, the ground dropping away beneath me as I rose toward the vaulted ceiling a hundred feet above. The cavern was deep enough to give me real room to maneuver, and from up here the Jiangshi army looked exactly like what it was—a sea of the dead, packed tight and surging toward the two people I'd left on the ground.
Time to thin the herd!
Pink-gold Veela fire bloomed in both my palms, the familiar warmth of the copied bloodline magic flooding through my arms and gathering in my hands in twin spheres of flame that crackled and spat with compressed destructive energy.
I wasn't going for precision here. I was going for volume and pure destruction!
Hopefully I don't cause a cave-in…
I lobbed the first fireball into the densest cluster of Jiangshi below me and watched it detonate on impact.
The explosion was spectacular. Pink-gold fire erupted outward in a sphere of superheated flame that consumed everything within a fifteen-foot radius instantly, the ancient undead bodies offering about as much resistance to Veela fire as dry paper offered to a blowtorch. The shockwave from the detonation sent another dozen Jiangshi tumbling across the marble floor like scattered bowling pins, their rigid bodies cartwheeling through the air before crashing into pillars and walls and each other with heavy, bone-cracking impacts.
I formed two more fireballs and threw them in rapid succession, targeting the flanks of the horde where the Jiangshi were trying to flow around the chokepoint of the stairway and find alternate routes up to the ledge. Twin detonations painted the cavern in strobing flashes of pink and gold, and the screaming intensified, a chorus of dead voices shrieking in frequencies that made my teeth ache.
I'm not holding back. Not even a little.
I rained fire down on them like a bomber making a strafing run, swooping low over the ranks of undead and releasing fireball after fireball in a pattern designed to maximize coverage and minimize any gaps in the destruction. Each detonation carved a smoking crater in the Jiangshi formation, leaving behind circles of ash and scorched marble surrounded by the twitching, burning remains of undead that hadn't been close enough to the epicenter to die instantly but had caught enough flame to be out of the fight.
And below me, on the ground, my Queen was being magnificent.
Lilja fought like something out of legend, because she was something out of legend. She was a Valkyrie of Odin's host unleashed in an enclosed space against an enemy that outnumbered her a hundred to one and was losing.
Her silver rapier blazed with runic light as she moved through the Jiangshi ranks with the speed of a Knight and the raw destructive power of a Rook, each piece trait from her Evil Piece enhancing her already formidable combat abilities to a level that turned the fight into something closer to art than violence. Every swing of her blade killed at least five Jiangshi, the divine enchantment on the Nordic steel burning through dark qi on contact and reducing ancient undead bodies to bisected, crumbling shells that fell apart before they hit the ground. The shockwaves from her strikes sent dozens more flying, their rigid bodies launched through the air like ragdolls to crash into the distant walls of the cavern with impacts that cracked stone and left dark smears on the carved pillars.
She didn't waste a single motion. Every step was purpose, every cut was lethal, every shift of her weight flowed into the next attack with a seamless, deadly grace that made it clear she had been doing this for a very, very long time in her second life. The Jiangshi couldn't touch her. They tried, lunging at her with clawed hands and snapping teeth, and she simply wasn't where they reached, her body flowing through their grasping fingers like water through a net, her rapier answering every failed grab with a killing stroke that left another heap of ash and dust on the marble floor.
She's beautiful. She's terrifying. She's my Queen!
"AARRRGGHH!" The Jiangshi leader's scream of rage cut through the din of battle from his position on the raised platform at the far end of the cavern. He was watching his army get dismantled by three people and the fury radiating off him was almost palpable, his composed, elegant demeanor cracking like old porcelain as Jiangshi after Jiangshi fell to fire and blade and dark cursed flame. "There are only three of them!" he shrieked in ancient Chinese, his voice breaking with incredulous fury. "THREE! Kill them! Overwhelm them! Bury them in bodies if you must!"
I formed another pink fireball in my right hand, a big one, packing it with enough Veela fire to level a small building, and lobbed it directly at the leader with a grin I couldn't suppress.
His milky eyes went wide.
The fireball screamed across the cavern trailing a comet tail of pink-gold sparks, and the Jiangshi leader abandoned every shred of his ancient dignity and hopped sideways in a frantic, jerking leap that carried him off the raised platform and behind one of the massive carved pillars a split second before the fireball hit the spot where he'd been standing.
Ha. Not so regal when you're hopping for your life, are you?
The detonation blew the top of the platform apart in a shower of marble fragments and pink flame, and Peter Pettigrew, still bound and gagged and kneeling exactly where the leader had left him, toppled sideways with a muffled shriek as chunks of burning stone rained down around him.
Oops. Probably should have aimed that a little more carefully. We can't go giving him such an easy death after all…
"I will make you suffer, devil scum!" the Jiangshi leader hissed as he emerged from behind the pillar, his crimson and black robes singed and smoking, his dead face contorted in a snarl. He reached into the folds of his ancient, musty burial robes and drew out a fistful of paper talismans, each one covered in dense calligraphy brushed in ink that I could tell, even from a hundred feet in the air, was not ink at all but old, old blood.
Well, that's not ominous at all.
The talismans began to glow.
I banked hard to the left as the Jiangshi leader hurled the first talisman in my direction, and the strip of paper moved through the air with a speed and precision that paper had absolutely no business possessing, cutting through the space I'd occupied a half-second earlier and detonating against the cavern ceiling in an explosion of pale green fire that blew a chunk of stone the size of a dining table free from the rock and sent it plummeting toward the cavern floor below.
"Harry!" Lilja's voice cut through the chaos from below, sharp with concern but not panic, never panic, because Lilja did not panic, she simply identified threats and eliminated them with extreme prejudice.
"I'm fine!" I called back, already dodging a second talisman that screamed past my right wing close enough for me to feel the heat of its payload against my feathers. "He's got tricks! Watch out for the paper!"
The leader was pulling more talismans from his robes, an apparently inexhaustible supply of them, and each one he threw flew with that same guided, almost sentient accuracy, curving and adjusting trajectory mid-flight as if they could see me, hunting me through the air with a relentlessness that forced me to abandon my bombing runs and focus entirely on evasion.
A third talisman detonated close enough to singe my left wing.
I snarled and threw a wall of pressurized water between myself and the next incoming talisman, and the paper struck the water barrier and exploded, the green fire hissing and spitting as it fought the liquid barrier for a full second before the water won and smothered it.
Water works on the talismans. Good to know. The fire's qi-based, not magical in the Western sense, and qi-fire doesn't burn as hot as Veela fire but it's got that corrosive quality that could eat through my defenses if I let it accumulate.
Below me, the battle was tilting decisively in our favor despite the leader's escalation.
Lilja had carved a corridor of destruction through the center of the Jiangshi formation that was now wide enough to drive a car through, the marble floor littered with dismembered corpses and piles of ash and the scattered remnants of burial robes that fluttered in the displaced air like morbid confetti.
Sirius had claimed a defensive position near one of the carved pillars and was alternating between his black fire spell and more conventional combat magic, his movements growing more fluid and confident as the fight progressed, the muscle memory of a once-brilliant duelist reasserting itself through the rust of eighteen years of atrophy.
The Jiangshi numbers were thinning rapidly. What had been hundreds was now maybe sixty or seventy, and those survivors were growing hesitant, their mindless aggression giving way to something that might have been self-preservation if undead creatures were capable of such a thing, their hopping advances slowing, their formation loosening, individual Jiangshi breaking from the ranks and retreating toward the tunnel mouths at the edges of the cavern.
The leader saw it too, and the sound he made was not a scream or a shout but something worse, a low, keening wail of despair and rage that resonated through the cavern.
He reached into his robes one more time and pulled out a single talisman that was different from the others, larger, the paper darker, the calligraphy glowing not green but deep, arterial red, and the qi emanating from it was so dense and concentrated that I could see it distorting the air around his fingers like heat haze rising from summer asphalt.
That one's different. That one's really different. Whatever that is, I don't want to find out what it does the hard way!
I didn't give him the chance to throw it.
I folded my wings and dropped, plummeting toward the throne platform in a controlled dive that closed the hundred-foot gap between ceiling and floor in under two seconds, and I formed the largest Veela fireball I'd created all night between my outstretched hands as I fell, compressing layer after layer of pink-gold flame into a sphere the size of a basketball that burned so bright it cast hard shadows across the entire cavern and made the remaining Jiangshi below me flinch and recoil from the light.
The leader saw me coming and his arm cocked back to throw his red talisman, but I was faster, or maybe just more desperate, and I hurled my fireball at point-blank range as I pulled out of the dive three meters above the platform.
Pink-gold fire engulfed the throne platform in a detonation that I felt through my entire body, the shockwave catching my wings and sending me tumbling sideways through the air before I could correct my trajectory and stabilize. Stone shattered. Braziers toppled. The pale flameless lights that had illuminated the platform guttered and died, plunging that end of the cavern into darkness broken only by the roaring, crackling inferno of Veela fire consuming everything in its radius.
Peter Pettigrew, bound and gagged and lying on the platform directly in the blast zone, would have died instantly if Lilja hadn't appeared from absolutely nowhere and scooped him off the stone floor one-handed by the back of his robes a half-second before my fireball hit, carrying him clear of the explosion with a burst of speed that left afterimages in the smoke-filled air and depositing him roughly, very roughly, on the marble floor twenty feet away where he landed with a wet thud and a muffled yelp of pain.
"You're gonna with I didn't save you, rat…" she said without looking at him, her eyes already fixed on the burning platform to assess the results of my attack.
The Jiangshi leader staggered out of the flames.
He was burning. Veela fire clung to his burial robes and his parchment skin in sheets of pink-gold that ate into him with hungry, relentless persistence, and his elaborate crimson silk was blackening and curling and falling away in flaming strips that drifted to the shattered stone like burning leaves. His red talisman was gone, incinerated in the blast, and his clawed hands were clutching at his own chest as if trying to hold himself together against the fire that was consuming him from the outside in.
But he was still standing. "You..." he rasped, and his voice was a ruined thing now, scorched and cracking, the refined accent of a dead aristocrat reduced to a guttural hiss. "You come into my court... you slaughter my children... you burn my throne..."
He took a step forward, and then another, each movement slower and more labored than the last as the Veela fire continued its work, eating through centuries of preserved undeath with patient, beautiful cruelty.
I landed on the cavern floor in front of him, my wings folding behind my back, my hands still wreathed in flickering pink flame.
"You ordered us killed first," I said. "Remember that part? The part where you said 'kill the human and capture the devils?' Because I remember that part very clearly."
The Jiangshi leader let out a sound that might have been a laugh if his throat hadn't been half-consumed by fire, a dry, rattling exhalation that sent sparks and ash drifting from his mouth.
"Your mother... will hear of this..." he managed.
"Mate, my mother will probably send you a thank-you card for giving me combat practice. And then she'll come and finish you off herself for attacking me in the first place…"
The ancient lord of the Jiangshi court collapsed.
The Veela fire consumed him in a final surge of pink-gold brilliance that reduced centuries of accumulated power and bitterness and undead aristocratic pride to a pile of glowing ash and half-melted gold thread on the shattered remains of his throne platform, and the remaining Jiangshi in the cavern, the fifty or sixty that had survived our assault, went rigid simultaneously, their bodies locking in place like puppets whose strings had been cut, before toppling forward one by one and hitting the marble floor with a cascade of heavy, meaty thuds that echoed through the cavern like a round of morbid applause.
Without their leader's qi to sustain them, the lesser Jiangshi were just corpses again.
The cavern went quiet.
Sirius emerged from behind his pillar, his clothes torn and scorched, his face streaked with ash and something dark, his borrowed wand still raised and tracking the fallen bodies with the paranoid vigilance of a man who did not trust anything dead to stay that way. When no further threats materialized, he lowered his wand slowly, like a man disarming a bomb, and let out a breath that seemed to carry about a decade's worth of tension with it.
"Is it over?" he asked.
"It's over," Lilja confirmed, pulling her rapier free from the last Jiangshi she'd killed and letting the body slide to the floor. She wasn't even breathing hard, though her silver armour was streaked with black dust and ash from head to toe, making her look like a warrior goddess who had just walked through a crematorium.
The three of us converged on Peter Pettigrew.
He lay on the marble floor where Lilja had dropped him, gagged, bleeding from his forehead, soaked in filthy water and now lightly singed from the proximity of my fireball, and he looked up at us with the wide, rolling eyes of a trapped animal that knew, with absolute certainty, that it was about to die.
Peter's muffled whimpering intensified behind his gag.
I crouched down to his eye level.
"Hello, Peter," I said, and my voice was calm in a way that I knew, from experience, was far more frightening than shouting.
I reached down and pulled the gag from his mouth, and the words started before the strip of rotten old silk had even hit the floor.
"P-please! Please, I'll do anything, I'll tell you everything, just please don't kill me, please, please, please..." Peter's voice came out in a high, reedy whine that bounced off the cavern walls and came back sounding even more pathetic than the original, his words tripping over each other in their desperate rush to be heard, as if sheer volume and speed might somehow build a wall between himself and the three people standing over him. Tears were already streaming down his round, grimy face, cutting pale tracks through the layers of sewer filth and dried blood, and his bound hands were clasped together in front of him in a mockery of prayer that made my stomach turn.
Then his darting, watery eyes found Lilja, and he stopped. I watched the recognition hit him in stages, his gaze traveling from her face to her eyes to the specific shade of red in her hair, and each detail that confirmed what he was seeing stripped another shade of color from his already pallid skin until he looked like he might faint.
"No..." he breathed, and the word came out so small and so broken that it barely qualified as speech. "That's... that's not... Lily?"
Lilja said nothing. She simply looked down at him with those cold green eyes and let the silence do the work.
"Lily, it is you, oh Merlin, oh God, how... you died, I saw... they told me you were... how are you alive?" Peter's shock lasted all of three seconds before his survival instincts, honed by decades of being the weakest person in every room he'd ever entered, kicked in and redirected his disbelief into something far more calculated. His expression shifted from stunned horror to desperate, trembling hope with a speed that was almost impressive in its shamelessness, and when he spoke again his voice had changed, pitched softer, warmer, reaching for a tone of nostalgic intimacy that he had absolutely no right to use. "Lily, oh thank God, thank God you're here, you were always the good one, you were always the one who understood, remember? Remember how you always forgave us? All those stupid pranks James and Sirius pulled, all those times we went too far, you always forgave us, you always gave people second chances because that's who you are, Lily, that's who you've always been..."
I did my best to not show my wince as he kept using the 'G' word over and over again.
I think Lilja was just too angry to notice the pain.
He was crying harder now, and I honestly couldn't tell how much of it was genuine terror and how much was performance, the two emotions so deeply intertwined in Peter Pettigrew's wretched soul that he probably couldn't separate them himself. He shuffled forward on his knees.
"You forgave Severus even after he called you that horrible word, remember? You forgave James after years of him being an arrogant toerag, your words, Lily, your words, and you married him because you saw the good in him, you always saw the good in people, please, Lily, please see the good in me, I was weak, I was so scared, you don't know what he was like, what he could do, I didn't have a choice, I swear I didn't have a choice..."
He's invoking my mother's kindness like a shield. Using her own compassion as a weapon against her. And the worst part is, he probably genuinely believes he deserves it.
Lilja let him finish.
She stood there with her arms at her sides and her rapier hanging loose in her right hand and she let Peter Pettigrew empty every last round in his chamber, let him invoke every memory and every kindness and every scrap of the girl she used to be until he ran out of ammunition and was left kneeling on the filthy stone floor with nothing but his own ragged breathing and the desperate, animal hope in his eyes that maybe, just maybe, he'd found the crack in her armor.
"Are you done?" Lilja asked, and her voice was so calm and so flat and so completely devoid of anything resembling the warmth Peter had been begging for that it landed on him like a bucket of ice water.
His hopeful expression curdled in real time, the light in his watery eyes dimming as he realized, with the slow, dawning horror of a man watching the last lifeboat pull away from the ship, that the girl he'd been appealing to was not standing in front of him. "Lily, please..."
"Siccing Voldemort on me and my newborn son twenty years ago was not a prank, Peter. That's not the same as Severous calling me a mudblood—one time!"
Each word landed like a hammer strike on an anvil, precise and heavy and ringing with a finality that echoed through the ruined cavern and left no room for argument or appeal or the faintest sliver of hope. Peter flinched at every syllable as if he were being physically struck, his body curling inward on itself, his bound hands rising to cover his face in a gesture so instinctively childlike that it would have been pitiable if directed at anyone other than the woman whose murder he had personally facilitated.
Lilja continued, and she took a single step toward him that made Peter scramble backward on his knees until his back hit the base of a shattered pillar and there was nowhere left to go. "You made a choice. You chose to trade my life and the life of my infant son for your own miserable survival, and you have spent the last twenty years becoming even worse and more vile scum since then!"
Her eyes flicked briefly to Sirius, who stood rigid and silent beside me, his jaw clenched so tight I could see the muscles jumping beneath the skin.
"N-no, Lily, you don't understand, he would have..."
"I understand perfectly." Lilja reached down and seized Peter by the back of his collar, her fingers closing around the mangy, filth-encrusted fabric with a grip that bunched the material tight against his throat and lifted him half off the ground in one smooth, effortless motion.
Peter let out a strangled, choking sound as his feet scraped against the stone, his bound hands clawing uselessly at the silk around his wrists, his body twisting and writhing in her grasp like a worm on a hook as she turned and began dragging him across the cavern floor toward one of the dark corridors that branched off from the main chamber.
"Nhhh... no, no, please, PLEASE, I'll tell you everything, I know things, I know where the Dark Lord is, I know his plans, I'm useful, I'm USEFUL, you need me alive, you NEED me..." Peter's voice rose to a shriek that cracked and splintered as Lilja hauled him over rubble and ash and the crumbled remains of Jiangshi without slowing her pace or acknowledging his words in any way, dragging him toward the yawning mouth of the corridor the way a cat drags a mouse to a quiet corner where it can take its time.
She stopped at the threshold of the darkness and turned back to look at me.
"Don't follow us," she said quietly, and her voice was gentle in a way that it hadn't been since we'd entered the sewers, soft and careful, as if she were handling something fragile. "This is something... some part of me I never want you to see."
I held her gaze and nodded once, and something in her expression eased, just barely, like a knot loosening by a single thread.
"Okay, Mum."
The word slipped out before I could stop it, and Lilja's composure fractured for just an instant, a micro-expression of raw, unguarded emotion flashing across her features so fast that if I'd blinked I would have missed it entirely, before the mask settled back into place and she turned and dragged Peter Pettigrew into the corridor, his wailing pleas swallowed by the darkness one syllable at a time until there was nothing left but the distant echo of a traitor's voice begging for a mercy he had never earned.
Sirius stood beside me in the silence that followed, and I could feel his indecision radiating off him like heat from a furnace, the tension in his body visible in the way his fingers kept tightening and loosening around his borrowed wand and the way his weight shifted from foot to foot as if he were physically being pulled in two directions at once. He glanced at me, a brief, complicated look that carried too many things in it to untangle in the half-second it lasted, something that might have been an apology or a request for permission or simply the acknowledgment of one person to another that what was happening in that corridor was something they both understood the necessity of even if neither of them wanted to say it out loud.
Then he turned and walked after Lilja without a word.
His footsteps echoed down the corridor, growing fainter with each step until they blended with the distant, muffled sound of Peter's continued begging and disappeared entirely, and I was alone in the cavern with nothing but the dead and the dying embers of Veela fire for company.
I found a chunk of shattered pillar that was roughly the right height and sat down on it, resting my elbows on my knees and letting my wings fold tight against my back as I stared at the mouth of the dark corridor and waited.
It was quiet for exactly four seconds.
"AAAIIIEEEEEE!"
Peter's first real scream hit me like a physical force, a raw, ragged, full-throated shriek of agony that came howling out of the corridor and filled the cavern with the sound of a man discovering, in vivid and excruciating detail, that the kind girl who used to forgive schoolboy pranks had died in Godric's Hollow twenty years ago and the woman who had taken her place did not share her predecessor's fondness for second chances. The scream climbed in pitch until it cracked, broke apart into a series of sobbing, hitching wails, and then reformed into another scream that was somehow worse than the first because it carried the specific quality of someone who had just been given a moment to catch their breath and realized it was only so they could appreciate what was coming next.
I winced.
I won't pretend I didn't. Whatever was happening down that corridor, it was ugly, and the sounds Peter Pettigrew was making were the kind of sounds that would follow a person into their dreams if they let them, raw and animal and stripped of every pretense of dignity or composure or humanity.
But beneath the wince, beneath the part of me that was still human enough to flinch at the sound of a man screaming in pain, something else stirred. Something older and colder and far more honest, the part of me that was my mother's son in ways that had nothing to do with Lily Evans and everything to do with Serafall Sitri, the devil blood that ran through my veins and carried with it instincts and impulses that did not flinch at suffering when that suffering was earned.
Good.We've got him.
Another scream echoed from the corridor, this one shorter, sharper, punctuated by a wet, gasping sob that dissolved into incoherent blubbering before trailing off into silence.
I sat on my chunk of broken pillar in the ruined court of a dead Jiangshi lord, surrounded by the ash and the silence and the occasional distant echo of a traitor learning the true cost of his betrayal, and I waited for my mother to finish her work.
"Well, sounds like someone is having fun back there…"
I jumped off the pillar so fast my wings flared involuntarily, my hands igniting with Veela fire before my feet even hit the ground as I spun toward the voice that had materialized right next to my ear without any warning, without any sound, without any detectable shift in the ambient energy of the cavern whatsoever, which should have been impossible given that I was actively maintaining my sensory awareness at combat levels and nothing short of a Satan-class entity should have been able to sneak up on me in an enclosed space.
The fire in my hands died the instant I saw who was standing there.
No. No way. There is absolutely no way!
"You..." I managed, and my voice came out approximately two octaves higher than I would have liked.
"Me!" he agreed cheerfully, his monkey-like voice bright and amused and carrying the specific tonal quality of someone who had been watching everything that just happened and found the entire affair enormously entertaining. He hopped up onto the chunk of pillar I'd just vacated and sat cross-legged on top of it with a fluid, inhuman grace that made the movement look less like a person sitting down and more like water finding its level, his tail, because of course he had a tail, a long, furred appendage the same golden-brown as his hair, curling lazily behind him as he settled into place and surveyed the devastation of the cavern with open, delighted curiosity.
Sun Wukong. The Monkey King. The Great Sage Equal to Heaven. The Victorious Fighting Buddha. The single most famous figure in all of Chinese mythology and one of the most powerful beings in the entire supernatural world was sitting on a broken pillar in a destroyed Jiangshi court underneath Shanghai, three feet away from me, grinning like he'd just heard the funniest joke in the world.
"What are you doing here?" I asked, and I was quietly proud of how steady the words came out, even if my heart was hammering against my ribs hard enough that Wukong could almost certainly hear it with those sharp, pointed ears of his.
He slapped his knee with one hand and his staff rattled against his shoulders with the motion.
"What am I doing here, he asks!" Wukong repeated to no one in particular, his golden eyes sparkling with the kind of delight that suggested my question was itself part of the joke. "What am I doing here! Ha!" He leaned forward on his perch, resting his chin on one hand and fixing me with a gaze that was simultaneously playful and piercing. "My senses stretch far and wide, little devil. Very far. Very wide. I felt this wretched little sect of hopping corpses get wiped off the map from halfway across the province, and I thought to myself, now who could be making such a wonderful mess down there? Who's got the stones to walk into a Jiangshi court and burn it to the ground!?"
He spread his arms wide in a theatrical gesture that encompassed the entire devastated cavern, the piles of ash, the shattered pillars, the scorched marble, the toppled braziers, the still-glowing embers of Veela fire that painted the destruction in fading shades of pink and gold.
"SO I CAME TO SEE!" he declared, as if this were the most natural and obvious thing in the world, as if one of the most powerful beings in Chinese mythology regularly popped underground to investigate supernatural disturbances like some kind of divine neighborhood watch. "And what do I find? A baby half devil with pretty pink fire and Sitri wings, a Valkyrie devil who is currently doing something very unpleasant to a screaming man in a tunnel back there, and..." He paused, sniffing the air with an exaggerated, theatrical motion, his nose wrinkling. "...the lingering stink of cursed fire with a demonic signature that I don't recognize. Interesting company you keep."
He can smell the demonic taint in Sirius's fire. He identified Lilja as a Valkyrie. He knows I'm a Sitri. He's been here for less than a minute and he's already read the entire situation like a book. This is either very good or very bad, and I genuinely cannot tell which.
"Am I in trouble?" I asked, because the question needed asking and there was no point dancing around it when the person I was talking to could literally smell deception. "A foreign devil coming into Chinese territory and wiping out a local supernatural faction isn't exactly a diplomatic non-event."
Wukong blinked at me, those golden eyes going wide with exaggerated surprise, and then he made a sound that was half-laugh and half-scoff.
"In trouble? For killing these dusty old bastards?" He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the nearest pile of Jiangshi ash and his lip curled with a contempt so casual and so deeply felt that it was clear this was not an opinion he'd formed today. "Kid, nobody up in Heaven liked these guys. Nobody. Not the Jade Emperor, not the Bodhisattvas, not even the local land gods who had to put up with their hopping minions sneaking up through the sewers and eating the occasional maintenance worker. This court's been a thorn in everyone's side for centuries, squatting down here in the dark, nursing their little grudge against the devils, kidnapping the odd tourist and draining them dry, and generally being a colossal pain in the celestial backside." He picked something out of his ear with his pinky finger, examined it with scholarly interest, and flicked it away before continuing. "The Jade Emperor sent them three separate formal warnings to knock it off. Three! You know what they did with the third one? The old lord down here, the one you just turned into a very pretty pile of ash, he used it as kindling for one of those stupid green fire braziers of his." Wukong shook his head with the weary disappointment of someone who had seen civilizations rise and fall and still couldn't believe how stupid some people insisted on being. "So no, little Sitri, you are not in trouble for cleaning out this particular nest of ungrateful corpses. If anything, you've saved Heaven the paperwork of eventually having to do it ourselves."
Well, that was good to know. Serafall was in charge of foreign affairs and I would have hated to cause a supernatural mess for her.
"That said," he added, and his voice dropped just enough to let me know that the next words were not part of the joke, "they did have some allies. Not many, and not powerful enough to worry old Wukong, but powerful enough to make life annoying for a young devil." He tilted his head, studying me with an appraising look that felt like being weighed on a scale I couldn't see. "There are a few sects in the region, living ones, who had arrangements with this court. Supply chains, information networks, mutual defense pacts, that sort of thing. They won't be happy when they find out their pet zombies got exterminated, and they'll come looking for answers eventually."
So the Jiangshi had friends. Of course they did. Nothing's ever simple, is it?
"GAAAAAHHH! PLEASE, PLEASE, I'LL TALK, I'LL TELL YOU EVERYTHING, JUST STOP, STOP, STOOOOOP!"
Peter's latest scream came howling out of the corridor like the wail of a damned soul discovering that Hell had levels it hadn't been warned about, the sound raw and wet and so thoroughly saturated with agony that it echoed through the cavern for a full three seconds after the voice itself had dissolved into a series of hitching, gurgling sobs that were somehow worse than the screaming.
Wukong's ears perked up at the sound and his grin stretched even wider, which I hadn't thought was physically possible, his golden eyes glittering with a delight that was entirely too enthusiastic for a man listening to someone being tortured in a tunnel.
"Your Valkyrie is thorough," he observed appreciatively, cocking his head toward the corridor the way a dog cocks its head at an interesting noise. "I like her already."
He hopped down from the pillar with a fluid, bouncing motion that didn't look like a person dismounting so much as gravity briefly becoming a suggestion he chose to humor, and he landed on the balls of his feet with his staff already spinning lazily in one hand.
"So!" he said, and his whole body seemed to vibrate with a sudden, crackling energy that hadn't been there a moment ago, the playful curiosity in his expression sharpening into something brighter and hungrier and infinitely more dangerous. "While we wait for your Queen to finish her work back there, what do you say, little Sitri?" He planted the butt of his staff on the marble floor and the impact sent a hairline crack racing across the stone in three directions, the casual, effortless display of power so absurdly disproportionate to the gesture that produced it that my mouth went dry. "Want to fight? I haven't had a good scrap in weeks and I'm getting twitchy."
His tail was wagging. The Monkey King, the Great Sage Equal to Heaven, the being who had fought the entire celestial army to a standstill and required the personal intervention of the Buddha himself to be contained, was wagging his tail at the prospect of a fight with a nineteen-year-old half-devil in a sewer.
He's serious. He's actually serious. Sun Wukong is asking me to spar with him in the ruins of a Jiangshi court while my Queen interrogates a war criminal fifty feet away and I can still hear the screaming.
I am going to politely and firmly decline, because I enjoy having all of my bones inside my body where they currently are.
"I think I'm going to have to respectfully pass on that one," I said, and I put every ounce of diplomatic training Sona had ever drilled into me behind the words to make sure they came out sounding like a measured strategic decision and not what they actually were, which was a teenage boy looking at a mountain and choosing not to headbutt it. "It's been a long night and I'm running low on reserves after the Jiangshi, and I'd rather not insult you by fighting at anything less than my best."
That sounded good right?
Wukong stared at me for a long, considering moment, his golden eyes unblinking, and then he let out a cackle so sharp and so sudden that it made me flinch despite my best efforts not to.
"Diplomatic too! Oh, I like you." He jabbed a finger at me, his grin settling into something warmer and more genuine than the manic battle-hunger that had been there a second ago. "That's a fancy way of saying you don't want old Wukong to kick your ass, and I respect the honesty hiding inside all that politeness. Smart kid. Most young fighters would have said yes just to save face and then spent the next month in a body cast regretting it."
He saw right through me. Of course he did. He's older than most civilizations and I tried to bluff him with etiquette.
"You're not up to old Wukong's level yet, that's true enough," he said, and the way he said "yet" carried a weight that I filed away for later examination, the implication that he considered the gap between us to be a matter of time. "But you know who you might enjoy a round or two with? My descendant, Bikou. Good kid, strong fighter, about your speed I'd wager, maybe a little above, and he's got enough monkey in him to make it fun without enough Buddha in him to make it educational." He chuckled at his own joke and then his brow furrowed, his golden eyes drifting upward as if consulting some internal ledger that tracked the whereabouts of every member of his bloodline across the globe. "Actually, where has that boy been lately? Haven't heard from him in months. He's off running around with some team or another, getting into trouble, being young and stupid, the usual."
The name Bikou rang a bell, not a loud one, but a distinct and specific chime in the back of my memory that was connected to a very particular source of information.
"That name's come up in some messages I've been getting from Kuroka," I said.
Wukong's ears twitched. "Kuroka? Who's that?"
"A Nekoshou who's been sending me nudes."
The Monkey King cackled. "Oh, kid, you Sitris are something else, you really are. Your mother Serafall was the same way, zero shame, maximum chaos, and here you are carrying on the family tradition in a sewer surrounded by corpses talking about cat girl nudes with the Monkey King."
Wukong wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and fixed me with a look that was still brimming with amusement but had settled into something steadier, something that suggested the conversation was winding down and the Monkey King's attention span, legendary in its brevity, was already drifting toward whatever cosmic distraction would claim it next.
"So," I said, "are we cool?"
Wukong grinned. "We're cool, little Sitri." He scooped his staff off the ground and slung it across his shoulders in one smooth motion, settling it into the groove it had clearly worn into his robes over the course of several millennia of habitual carrying. "You're alright. Funny kid, smart kid, good instincts, pretty fire. Tell your mom I said hi." And then he was gone.
I stood in the ruined cavern, alone again, surrounded by ash and silence and the distant, muffled sounds of Peter Pettigrew's continued education in the consequences of betrayal, and I blinked.
I blinked again.
Did that just happen? Did I just have a casual conversation about Kuroka's nudes with Sun Wukong in a sewer? Or has the mold down here gotten into my lungs and I'm hallucinating on some kind of ancient Chinese fungal spore that makes you see mythological figures who want to spar with you!?
I looked down at the chunk of pillar where Wukong had been sitting. There was a crack in the marble where he'd planted his staff, a thin, clean fracture radiating outward from a single point of impact that absolutely had not been there before.
Nope. That happened. That definitely happened…
The soft sound of footsteps echoing from the corridor snapped me out of my spiraling thoughts, and I rose from the pillar as two figures emerged from the darkness.
Lilja came first, her silver Valkyrie armor no longer gleaming but painted in arterial red that caught the fading light of the dying Veela embers scattered throughout the cavern. The blood covered her from pauldron to greave in thick, wet streaks that dripped steadily onto the marble floor with each step she took, leaving a trail of crimson footprints behind her like breadcrumbs marking the path back to something no one would ever want to find. Her rapier hung loose at her side, equally drenched, and her red hair had escaped its battle braid in places to hang in blood-matted clumps around her face.
But her eyes were calm. Calmer than I had seen them since we entered the sewers, actually, the cold fury that had been simmering behind her gaze since the moment Peter Pettigrew's name first crossed her lips finally, completely extinguished. She looked like a woman who had been carrying a weight for twenty years and had finally, finally set it down.
Sirius followed a few steps behind her.
"It's done," Lilja said, and she let out a long, slow sigh that seemed to deflate her entire body by an inch, her shoulders dropping, her spine losing some of its rigid battle-readiness, her whole posture shifting from warrior to something softer and more human. She looked around the devastated cavern, taking in the piles of ash and the toppled braziers and the scattered remains of several hundred Jiangshi, and a small, almost playful smile tugged at the corner of her blood-flecked lips. "Did we miss anything out here?"
I started laughing.
I couldn't help it. The absurdity of everything that had happened in the last hour crashed into me all at once, the Jiangshi horde and the burning and the screaming and the Monkey King appearing out of nowhere to chat about Kuroka's nudes and ask if I wanted to spar, and the only response my brain could produce was laughter, bright and sharp and slightly unhinged, echoing off the cavern walls in a way that made it sound even more manic than it already was.
"Oh, he's finally cracked," Sirius muttered, his thousand-yard stare breaking just long enough for him to shoot me a sideways look of genuine concern. "I knew it. All that mold down here, it's gotten into his lungs, rotted his brain. Knew we should have brought masks…"
Lilja's playful expression shifted into something more worried, her green eyes searching my face. She took a step toward me, one hand rising as if to check my temperature, and I waved her off while still trying to get my laughter under control.
"I'm fine," I managed between chuckles, my ribs starting to ache from the force of it. "I'm fine, I promise, it's just..." I glanced at the crack in the marble again and another wave of laughter threatened to break free. "Later. I'll explain later." I mouthed the word again when she continued to look unconvinced, and something in my expression must have communicated that this was genuinely a story that needed proper context and not a symptom of sewer-induced psychosis, because she gave me a slow nod and let the matter drop.
"Let's get out of here," Sirius said, his voice rough and tired in a way that had nothing to do with physical exhaustion. "I've had enough of underground crypts and dead things and..." He trailed off, his gaze flickering briefly to Lilja and then away again just as quickly. "I need a drink. Several drinks. Possibly an entire distillery."
"Seconded," I agreed, finally getting my breathing back under control. "I know a hotel with an excellent bar and people who will be very happy to see us alive."
The three of us made our way out of the ruined Jiangshi court, stepping over ash and rubble and the occasional still-twitching corpse that hadn't quite finished dying, and none of us looked back.
…The Gremory family's Shanghai hotel had a bar that probably cost more to decorate than most people's houses, all dark mahogany and crystal decanters and plush velvet seating that seemed designed to make you forget you had just spent the evening wading through sewage and burning several hundred undead corpses to ash. The staff had been remarkably professional about our appearance when we arrived, whisking us off to private suites to shower and change into clean clothes before politely pretending they had never seen the blood-soaked, filth-encrusted disaster that had stumbled through their lobby an hour earlier.
Is it weird this happened two days in a row now?
Now, freshly cleaned and dressed in clothes that did not smell like death and ancient Chinese sewer systems, I sat in a corner booth with Lilja and watched Sirius make an absolute spectacle of himself at the bar.
He was completely sloshed, his body swaying on the barstool like a ship in a storm, his words slurring together into an almost incomprehensible mess of syllables that somehow still managed to convey the general shape of what he was trying to say. The glass in his hand was his seventh, or possibly his eighth.
I had lost count somewhere around the point where he started loudly toasting "the death of that rat-faced bastard" to the entire room.
He's earned this, I suppose.
The truly baffling part of the scene unfolding before me was not Sirius's drunken state but the woman he was currently attempting to flirt with. She was Chinese nobility if her bearing and attire were any indication, dressed in an elegant silk kimono embroidered with golden phoenixes that probably cost more than a small car, her black hair pinned up with jade ornaments that caught the low light of the bar every time she moved her head. She was beautiful in that ageless, refined way that suggested either excellent genetics or supernatural heritage, and she was, inexplicably, still engaged in conversation with the drunk, rude Englishman who kept leaning too close and gesturing too wildly with his drink.
"Did he jusht... did he jusht call her a 'fit bird'?" I muttered, watching Sirius gesture expansively and nearly knock over his glass in the process.
"He did," Lilja confirmed, her tone carrying the particular weariness of someone who had known Sirius Black for a very long time and was not remotely surprised by his behavior. "And she laughed."
The noblewoman did indeed laugh.
Some women are strange. Very, very strange.
I turned my attention away from the trainwreck at the bar and back to Lilja, who was staring down at the untouched drink in front of her with an expression that had been growing steadily more troubled over the past ten minutes. The calm, settled peace I had seen in her eyes when she emerged from that corridor had given way to something else, a quiet guilt that furrowed her brow and tightened the corners of her mouth every time she glanced in my direction.
"Alright," I said, leaning back against the plush velvet of the booth. "Out with it. What's eating you?"
Lilja's jaw tightened. "I left you unguarded… I'm a bad Queen."
"You were busy."
"I was so consumed by my own rage that I did not sense one of the most powerful beings in all of Chinese mythology appearing directly beside my King." Her voice was low and sharp, each word bitten off with a precision that told me she had been rehearsing this self-flagellation in her head for the entire trip back to the hotel. "Sun Wukong, Harry. I did not even notice him arrive because I was too busy torturing a pathetic rat of a man who was already bound and helpless."
Ah. There it is.
I reached under the table and found her hand, lacing my fingers through hers and giving a gentle squeeze that made her finally look up from her drink and meet my eyes.
"Lilja." I held her gaze steadily, letting her see the complete absence of blame or disappointment in my expression. "Nothing happened. He showed up, we had a chat, he left. That's it. If he had wanted to hurt me, there is absolutely nothing you could have done to stop him anyway, so the point is moot."
"That is not the point," she started, but I squeezed her hand again and she fell silent.
"That is exactly the point. Wukong could have killed all three of us without breaking a sweat if he wanted to. He didn't want to. He was just curious about who wiped out the Jiangshi court, and when he found out, he was actually pretty pleased about it." I smiled, remembering the Monkey King's enthusiastic dismissal of the "dusty old bastards" and his wagging tail when he asked me to spar. "He said nobody in Heaven liked them anyway. Apparently, the old lord down there used the Jade Emperor's third formal warning as kindling for one of his braziers."
Some of the tension drained from Lilja's shoulders, though the guilt in her eyes didn't fully dissipate. "What did you talk about?"
"Various things. He warned me that the Jiangshi had some allied sects who might come looking for payback eventually. He asked if I wanted to fight him, and I very diplomatically declined because I enjoy having my skeleton inside my body. He mentioned his descendant Bikou and said I might enjoy sparring with him instead, since he's apparently closer to my level."
"Bikou?" Lilja's brow furrowed slightly.
"He's a friend of Kurokas. We text a bit in between the nude pictures she's been sending me…" I said the words casually, without really thinking about them, my brain still half-focused on the memory of Wukong's cackling laughter when I mentioned the nudes. "Wukong thought it was hilarious when I told him about it. Called me a true Sitri, said my mother was the same way, zero shame and maximum chaos."
The guilty look on Lilja's face vanished. It did not fade or soften or gradually give way to another emotion. It simply ceased to exist, replaced in the span of a single heartbeat by a narrow-eyed stare that pinned me to the back of the booth with the force of a physical blow. Her green eyes, so like the ones I remembered from photographs of Lily Evans, had gone very, very cold. "I'm sorry," she said, and her voice was soft in a way that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. "Did you just say that criminal cat has actually been sending you nudes this past month, and this is the first I'm hearing of it?"
Oh no.
I gulped.
"I... well... technically speaking..." I started, and then stopped, because there was absolutely no way to finish that sentence that did not end with me in significantly more trouble than I was already in.
Lilja's grip on my hand tightened. Not painfully, not yet, but with a promise of future discomfort that was impossible to miss.
I was someone who had a harem and peerage full of beautiful women, which meant I had learned through extensive trial and error exactly what to do in situations like this one.
When in doubt, distract!
I leaned forward across the booth before Lilja could say another word, cupped her face in my hands, and sealed her mouth with a kiss.
It was hot and firm and deliberate, the kind of kiss that short-circuited the angry lecture building behind her eyes and replaced it with something far more primal. I felt her stiffen against me in surprise, her grip on my hand tightening reflexively, and then I deepened the kiss and swallowed the indignant noise she made before it could fully form.
Her pout was still there, I could feel it against my lips, the stubborn set of her mouth that said she was absolutely not going to let me get away with this distraction tactic even as her body began to betray her resolve. I traced my tongue along the seam of her lips and felt the exact moment her resistance crumbled, her mouth opening with a soft, breathy sound that vibrated against my tongue.
"Mmmnnh..."
The moan that escaped her was quiet, muffled by my mouth, but it sent a surge of heat straight down my spine nonetheless. Her free hand came up to grip the front of my shirt, fingers curling into the fabric like she couldn't decide whether she wanted to push me away or pull me closer, and I made the decision for her by tilting her head back and kissing her deeper until she was practically melting against the velvet cushions of the booth.
When I finally pulled back, Lilja's cheeks were flushed a delicate pink that spread down her neck and disappeared beneath the collar of the clean blouse she had changed into after our shower. Her green eyes were slightly dazed, her lips parted and glistening, and the furious interrogation that had been building in her expression had been thoroughly derailed.
Crisis averted. For now…
"Tomorrow we have to meet up with the rest of our family and head back to Hogwarts," I said, keeping my voice low and intimate, pitched just for her ears despite the ambient noise of the bar. "We might be busy for the rest of the day once that happens, meetings and debriefs and everyone wanting to know what happened in Shanghai." I stroked my thumb across her cheekbone, watching her eyelashes flutter at the gentle touch. "So why don't we go upstairs and have some last minute celebration sex before real life catches up with us again?"
Lilja's pout returned in full force, her brow furrowing even as the blush on her cheeks deepened to a shade that was almost crimson. She looked like a woman caught between two equally powerful impulses, the desire to continue being angry at me warring openly with the desire to take me up on my very reasonable suggestion. She was a devil now after all, and devil women had needs.
"I'm still mad at you," she muttered, but there was no real heat behind the words, just the stubborn pride of someone who refused to admit they had been successfully distracted. "We are going to have a conversation about that criminal cat, Harry. With visual aids so I can see exactly what that shameless woman has been sending my son."
That sounds like the opposite of a punishment, but I'm smart enough not to say that out loud.
"Absolutely," I agreed, rising from the booth and offering her my hand. "Tomorrow. After we're back Hogwarts. We'll have a very thorough conversation about it."
Lilja took my hand and let me pull her to her feet, her fingers intertwining with mine in a grip that was equal parts possessive and affectionate. She was still pouting, still blushing, still radiating that particular energy of a woman who knew she was being handled and resented it even as she allowed it to happen, but she did not protest as I began leading her toward the elevator bank at the far end of the lobby.
I spared one last glance toward the bar where Sirius was still holding court with his Chinese noblewoman, his laugh loud and braying as he gestured so wildly with his drink that some of it slopped over the rim and splashed onto the polished bartop. The woman leaned away from the splash with practiced grace, her smile never wavering, and Sirius didn't even seem to notice as he launched into what appeared to be an animated retelling of some story that required extensive hand movements to properly convey.
He'll be fine. Probably. Maybe.
I shrugged and turned away, leading my Queen toward the elevators and the celebration awaited us upstairs.
…The next morning.
I woke to the familiar sensation of soft, warm skin pressed against every inch of my body and the even more familiar sensation of my morning arousal making itself known with enthusiastic insistence.
Lilja was draped over me like a living blanket, her naked form molded to mine in a tangle of limbs and bedsheets that suggested neither of us had moved much after finally passing out from exhaustion sometime in the small hours of the morning. Her head rested on my chest, her red hair spilling across my skin in a curtain of crimson silk, and her perky breasts were pressed directly against my face in a way that put her rosy pink nipples approximately two inches from my lips. The soft mounds rose and fell with each slow breath she took, and I found myself momentarily hypnotized by the gentle rhythm of it, the way the morning light filtering through the hotel curtains painted her pale skin in shades of gold and cream.
This is a very good way to wake up. Top five, at least.
My cock, ever the opportunist, had positioned itself with unerring accuracy against the warm, slick heat of her pussy, the swollen head pressing insistently against her folds in a way that made my hips want to rock forward entirely of their own accord. The temptation to simply thrust up into her was overwhelming, my body still running hot from the memories of everything we had done last night, but before I could act on the impulse Lilja stirred against me with a low, plaintive groan.
"Nnngh... no more..."
Her voice was husky with sleep and something else, a raw, thoroughly-used quality that sent a surge of masculine pride straight to my already aching erection. She shifted her hips away from my cock with a wince, her thighs pressing together protectively, and when she lifted her head to look at me her green eyes were equal parts affectionate and accusatory.
"My King is insatiable," she mumbled, the words half-muffled against my chest as she let her head drop back down with a heavy exhale. "It is abundantly clear why you need a harem. One woman alone could never hope to keep up with your appetites without being reduced to a boneless, sore mess incapable of walking properly."
I grinned down at her, reaching up to brush a strand of hair away from her face with a tenderness that belied the very non-tender things I wanted to do to her. "Let's just take a shower then. I'll gently wash you, nice and slow, no funny business. Scout's honor."
I was never a scout…
Lilja lifted her head again just enough to give me a deeply skeptical look that said she did not believe a single word of that promise, but she allowed me to help her out of bed nonetheless, her legs wobbling slightly as she put weight on them for the first time since I had thoroughly destroyed her ability to use them properly the night before.
An hour later, freshly cleaned and dressed and looking significantly more presentable than we had any right to after the previous evening's activities, we made our way down to the hotel lobby where the rest of our group had already gathered.
Asia spotted me first, her gentle face lighting up with that sweet, guileless smile that never failed to make me feel like I needed to protect her from every bad thing in the entire world. She was wearing a simple white sundress that made her look even more angelic than usual, her blonde hair brushed to a shine and her green eyes bright with the particular contentment of someone who had spent a relaxing evening doing absolutely nothing dangerous or traumatic.
"Good morning, Harry!" she called out, practically bouncing on her heels as I approached.
"Good morning, Asia." I smiled warmly at my newest Pawn, taking in the healthy color in her cheeks and the absence of the haunted shadows that had lingered in her eyes when I first found her in Japan. "Did you sleep okay?"
"I did! Jasmine and Marlene and I had a movie night." Her smile widened at the memory, a faint blush coloring her cheeks. "We finished finding Nemo and then we watched something called 'The Princess Bride' and ate so much popcorn I thought I might burst. It was wonderful!"
Good. She deserves wonderful things after everything she's been through.
I pulled her into a hug, wrapping my arms around her small frame and pressing a gentle kiss to the top of her head. She made a soft, happy sound against my chest and hugged me back with a fierce tightness that seemed to say she still couldn't quite believe this was her life now, that she had people who cared about her and wanted her to be happy and would never, ever throw her away like garbage the way the Church had.
"I'm glad you had fun," I murmured against her hair, and I felt her squeeze me even tighter before finally pulling back with pink cheeks and a smile so bright it could have powered a small city.
Marlene and Jasmine were standing a few feet away, both of them watching the scene with fond expressions that shifted abruptly to surprise when their gazes moved past me to something over my shoulder.
Or rather, someone.
"Is that..." Marlene started, her eyes widening.
"Sirius?" Jasmine finished, and there was a complicated cocktail of emotions in her voice, hope and wariness after the last time she saw him in Hogwarts Forbidden Forest.
Sirius was standing near the elevator bank, looking like a man who had seen things. Not the kind of things we had seen in the Jiangshi court, the battle and the blood and the screaming, but something else entirely, something that had put a hollow, thousand-yard quality in his grey eyes that I had not seen there even when we were surrounded by hundreds of ravenous undead trying to eat us.
He was wearing the same new clothes from last night, I noticed, although they were already rumpled and disheveled in a way that suggested things had been very interesting for him after Lilja and I left him at the bar.
Jasmine moved toward him, her steps quickening with each stride, and I could see the exact moment she was about to throw herself into his arms for a hug because her whole body telegraphed the intention before she caught herself at the last second. She stopped short, her arms half-raised, her expression shifting from eager to concerned as she got a better look at his face. "Sirius? What happened to you?"
Sirius's haunted gaze drifted to Jasmine, then past her to where I was standing with Lilja, and something in his expression twitched in a way that suggested he was reliving a memory he desperately wished he could forget.
"I spent a night with a crazy woman," he said, and his voice had the flat, distant quality of someone recounting a near-death experience. He glanced at me and Lilja again, and I saw his jaw tighten. "I should have known it was too good to be true considering she was so into me while I was acting like a drunk jackass. She... she did things to me..." He trailed off, his eyes going unfocused, and I watched him shudder from head to toe like a man trying to shake off a bad dream that had followed him into the waking world.
"...Nope." The word came out of my mouth before I could stop it, firm and final and absolutely not interested in hearing a single additional detail about whatever the Chinese noblewoman had done to Sirius Black in the privacy of her hotel room.
Some things I do not need to know. This is very high on that list.
I turned to the assembled women with a smile that was perhaps a touch too bright, clapping my hands together in a gesture of let's-move-things-along enthusiasm.
"Come on everyone, we have a portkey to catch. The Shanghai magical district awaits, and I for one would like to get back to Hogwarts before anything else unexpected happens."
Maybe on the way I could distract Sirius by asking him where he learned demonic magic…
XXX
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