It had been a little over two weeks since Abigail Reid had come tumbling out through the ashes of the Ministry's fireplace, bearing ill tidings.  In the immediate aftermath, a manor house had burned to ash, Dementors had started to swarm over the countryside once more, and the fog of the strange spirits called pentrals had begun to cloud the minds of wixes like Abby's sister Aileen. 

They knew more now than they had that first day.  The Lilly siblings were still at large, but they had at least begun to break down the dark web of magic that the pair had been spinning for years at the isolated lake house near Keswick. With Level Nine still without leadership, it seemed as if finding a solution to the pentral problem was slow going, but at least they had the start of an answer for what was afflicting all of the wixes who had been sent in St. Mungo's.

Jonas had been in the right place at the right time -- or perhaps the wrong place at the wrong time -- to inherit the brunt of the investigation.  As a result, this wasn't the first time that he had had an appointment to check in with the Department Head about the Abby Reid case, and it certainly wouldn't be the last.  The red-headed Auror breezed into the outer office exactly at the appointed hour, giving a nod to the trainee who had been assigned to act as Carstairs' temporary assistant today.  The kid nodded back, immediately heading into the Department Head's office to let him know that his next appointment had arrived. 

Jonas paused, studying the ceiling as he waited for the trainee's return.  Level Two's current Department Head preferred to follow protocol, far more than Cameron Rosier ever had.  Unless one happened to be Ed Pratt, who could get away with nearly anything, one didn't enter unannounced. 

The wait didn't more than half a minute.  As well as his greater predilection for decorum, Solomon Carstairs was also far more punctual and efficient. 

"Go ahead in, Auror Trevelyan," the trainee told him, holding the door open as he exited Carstairs' office.  "He's ready."

Jonas flashed the kid a smile.  "Thanks," he said as he started past him into the office, slowing his pace to minimize his limp.

He'd been relatively friendly with Rosier once upon a time, once they'd gotten past the initial awkwardness of their first meeting, but with the grouchy Department Head's successors -- Admete Brown and now Solomon Carstairs -- Jonas had maintained more of a polite, careful distance.  These days in the office, the messy and disorganized stacks of papers that had marked Rosier's tenure were long gone, carefully and efficiently filed away.

"Sir," he said by way of greeting, pausing to pull the door closed behind him.  "How's your morning been?"

            "Trevelyan, sir."

Solomon Carstairs looked up from a memo he had been reading, brow wrinkled with bewilderment. He had just received the note from level nine - requesting permission to take over one of their dormant investigations at the Royal Observatory. It didn't help that the Department of Mysteries was ticking along without a figurehead whose motivations Solomon could question; this was from an Unspeakable, and Unspeakables didn't talk about their work. Bloody convenient. The sooner they interviewed and vetted Morgenthau, the better.

"Show him in. Run this down to nine, after? They aren't taking paper planes today." Solomon turned over the memo and scribble a response in the affirmative, because he couldn't see why not. "And bring in some tea for us when you get back."

The trainee disappeared to tend to these tasks and a moment later Solomon found himself carefully observing Auror Trevelyan's entrance. "Sir. How's your morning been?" By reputation, a dependable man, but one with whom he hadn't been especially friendly.

"Surprisingly sedate." Sol smiled dryly, adjusting his spectacles. "Do sit, Trevelyan. You have the latest on this... what's the word? Pentral? This pentral business?" he reached for a folder that was on the top of a neat stack to his right, and flipped it open.

With Rosier, he had made a habit of waltzing in with a smart remark, but such attitude would not endear him to the current head of Level Two.  On the flip side, Solomon Carstairs was unlikely to illicitly dig through anyone's desk after-hours, beg him for gin, or forget to wear trousers to the office, so overall, it was a welcome trade-off.

Jonas crossed the office and slid a chair back, lowering himself carefully to sit. 

"Yeah, pentrals, sir," he agreed.  He shifted slightly in the chair, angling his body slightly to the side so that he could comfortably stretch out his bad leg. 

Dementors or worse? Carstairs had asked, after Abby Reid had brought this trouble to the Ministry's doorstep.  Jonas had only been able to give a simple confirmation to the question then, but now, two weeks later, Level Two was better prepared to elucidate.  Dementors were part of the current troubles that they were facing, but for once they were more a symptom than a cause.

"Reckon you've been reading the regular reports," he said, nodding to the file folder that Carstairs had begun to examine.  "So you can stop me if you feel like you're up to date.  But I figure there are three parts of the investigation that you should be caught up with."  He ticked them off on his fingers.  "The Lilly siblings and the suspected murders, the pentrals themselves, and then the situation with the general populace." 

It was by far the most complicated case that he'd been part of, whether before or after returning to the Ministry.  What had started with Abby Reid's escape and a swarm of Dementors had expanded to include the bodies buried around the Lilly Lakehouse, numerous possessions by the strange, spirit-like pentrals, and the mystery of the Lilly siblings themselves, who stood like a fulcrum at the center of so much chaos and dark magic.  In comparison, even the Runespoor investigation seemed like a simple whodunnit.

Jonas inclined his head to the wizard behind the desk.  "Preference on where to start, sir?  Or do you have any questions up front?"

            "Preference on where to start, sir?  Or do you have any questions up front?"

He decided that he liked Trevelyan's approach. It had a sense of order - Pratt's verbal reports were  frank and blunt but not always what Solomon needed for investigations such as this. A sprawling crime scene, still spreading itself across the British countryside like a visible plague. The dead bodies concerned him. He was about to say as much when the door opened and a tea tray floated in to settle on his desk.

Sol nodded dismissively at the trainee, who shut the door behind him as he left.

"Let us backtrack a moment," he leaned forward and drew his wand, tapping it against the teapot. "The squib corpses we found in June[1]. Do we have confirmation that they're relevant to the Lilly's?" Primly, the pot rose and decanted two fragrant servings of Assam.

He took his own cup and saucer in hand, sitting back comfortably with the case folder opened up on one side. Photos of the siblings stared back at him. Red hair. Almasy had also been redhead, like her niece. Perhaps he should start keeping an eye on all of them. Solomon glanced at Trevelyan's own hair.

"You can start with telling me more about them and our hunt, either way."

1.	Graveyard Garden Uncovered & House of Horrors

It was perhaps unsurprising that Carstairs's first concern was about the possible link to Ira Almasy.  That case, along with the subsequent doomed raid on the House of Atreus back in May, had been the first real black eye on Level Two since the former Senior Auror took over as Department Head.

Jonas nodded and took a deep breath, setting his file folder flat on his lap as he recalibrated his thoughts.

"So of the fifteen bodies found in Almasy's garden back in June, nine were identified as Squibs," he said, his cadence even and matter-of-fact.  He hadn't been involved in the investigation involving Ira Almasy back in the spring, or in the raid on her home, and so that aspect of the Lilly case had involved quickly getting up to speed.  Thankfully, Andromeda Gamp had been more than helpful.

"Based on what we've untangled so far, at least three of those individuals appear to have had a direct connection to Lori Lilly -- which is one of the places where it all starts to get a bit interesting, sir," he said, eyebrows raising as he glanced sidelong at Carstairs.  "A couple of decades back, our Lori Lilly was known as a Squib herself.  She never attended Hogwarts or any other magical schools, as far as we've been able to find, and her name was never recorded in the Book of Admittance.  The neighbors who remembered her from back in the '80s said that she used to be extremely reclusive -- they almost never saw her set a foot outside her manor."

This was the second part of the mystery that had drawn him in -- uncovering the identity of the witch who had lived as Lori Lilly.  Lore, almost-Aileen had called her.  Whatever her real name was, they were going to ferret it out.

"So three of the corpses from Almasy's garden were older Squibs who had once been pen pals of Lori Lilly -- sort of a Squib social group," he continued briskly.  "All of the correspondences seem to have stopped sometime in the early '90s.  We're trying to sort through to see if she reached out to any of them, or if they'd gotten back in touch before they went missing, but we haven't managed to hit on a more recent direct connection yet.  And we haven't found anything else directly linking the Lillys to Almasy, either."

With tea cup and saucer in hand, Solomon lapsed into silence whilst he listened to the report. In his mind's eye he pictured the ruins in which they had discovered Almasy's morbid garden - the slowly decaying corpses, some already with flesh stripped to the bone. He had gone himself to see it: partly out of professional interest and partly out of guilt. Wizarding society turned a blind eye to squibs; even he would have thought nothing if a Carstairs squib had gone missing.

"Three is enough to indicate a substantial connection," he finally spoke before putting down his drink - it had not been tasted. "But none of the contracts Almasy left behind mention the Lillys. If she wanted to protect them, she would have done away with the corpses as well."

He knew that much about Almasy at least, that she calculated steps ahead of where they'd been investigating. It was safe for him to assume they might not find further evidence of the Russian aristocrat's influence.

"So we have a reclusive squib and her brother. And no trace yet of their real identities?" Solomon turned away from his thoughts, meeting Jonas in the eye. "I assume that the creation of these pentrals require strong magic. What can you tell me about them?"

Substantial was a little too certain of a word for Jonas's liking when it came to this potential link, but the point wasn't worth litigating.  The investigation into Ira Almasy had hit many in the Department hard, and Carstairs apparently harder than most.  Before the raid at the end of April that had gone so poorly, Almasy had been known to most of the magical world as a socialite and a patron of the arts.  Her revelation as a villain had been a strike against the Ministry's good judgement.

But after all of the betrayals he'd been witness to in the magical world over the past two decades -- Trevor Reid and the Runespoor investigation, Mortimer Gamp, You-Know-Who's takeover of the Ministry -- Jonas felt almost jaded to the idea that the upper crust of the magical world had something other than society's best interests at heart.  If Muggles had reason to fear that absolute power corrupted absolutely, the corrosion brought about by access to magic was on another level.

"I'm not sure I'd say we've no trace of their identities, sir," he replied, eyebrows raising.  "We found some Ravenclaw memorabilia in the bedroom that appears to have belonged to Lee Lilly, but there doesn't seem to be any record in the Book of Admittance of anyone by that name qualifying to attend Hogwarts, either.  It seems like he first surfaced around 1990 as well, about the time that Lori Lilly began telling her neighbors that she was a homeschooled witch.  If he was at Hogwarts under another identity before that, then we'll find him."

He paused, swallowing as he mentally shifted gears to the strange, wispy spirits that had come flooding out of the Lakeside manor.

"It's been a bit tricky to track down information about pentrals," he said.  "Most of the records about them have been...ahh, a little more flowery'n I'd hope for -- mostly medieval poems and the like -- and Level Nine's been less than helpful at providing more reliable sources."  The status of the Department of Mysteries, still without a functioning leader since the Mortimer Gamp disaster, had become a thorn in the side of several Level Two investigations. Carstairs had probably had more than his fill of Aurors griping about it already.

But it wasn't worth adding more complaints right now.  Jonas gave a shrug and went on. 

"Back in the 1500s and 1600s, it seems as if creating a pentral was thought of as something romantic -- keeping a bit of your loved one behind after they passed," he said matter-of-factly.  "From what we can fathom, pentrals are created through a ritualistic murder.  One of our current pentrals -- the one who seems to have taken up residence inside Aileen Reid -- said that she remembered being hexed by Lori Lilly, and then waking up to a voice singing.  Some of the old poems talk about trapping pentrals in things like a locket or a book.  The Lillys seem to have used paintings and mirrors, trapping the souls of the folks they murdered inside them to hold them prisoner."

Solomon set aside his tea as he listened to what little information they had derived about the Lillys. Ah, there was something to work with then - even if it only narrowed down one of the siblings to being a possible alumnus of the house of Ravenclaw. A homeschooled witch was a possibility but if the Aurors were considering Lee having been admitted to Hogwarts under a different identity, his sister might as well have done the same.

            If he was at Hogwarts under another identity before that, then we'll find him."

"A matter of time," Sol conceded with a nod. Trevelyan had said nothing further of the connection with Almasy, which reassured the older wizard that the investigation was leading them to different lines of thought - the further away he got from playful threats in his personal life[1] the more objective he could afford to be.

This talk of pentrals certainly pushed him towards a more emotionally removed frame of mind. It was a foreign word to Solomon's knowledge of magic and souls, but in keeping with what he understood about the nature of separating one from their corporeal form. The Lillys weren't their first foray into that realm.

"Keeping a bit? Or the entirety of their soul?" he raised his eyebrows, corner of his mouth quirking into a dry smile at the morbid romanticism. "Not quite a Horcrux then, if they're only trapping the soul." No fragmentation.... curious. He leaned back in his chair with a heavy sigh.

So Aileen Reid had one inside of her. Another person occupying the same body.

"The Minister and I have uncovered a replacement for level nine." Sol glanced at the Auror thoughtfully. "Once he's settled, we'll see what we can pull. Any idea on how sustainable Reid's condition is? Or are we flying without a light?"

1.	Draw A Line - 24th December '10 Reflect Upon Thy Sin - 16th Feb '11

New leadership coming to Level Nine was good news indeed.  Jonas couldn't say what the Unspeakables were up to in the best of times -- that was the point, really -- but ever since the fall of the Gamps, the Department of Mysteries had been even less forthcoming than usual.  With an investigation like this, where they knew so little about the magic involved to begin with, the lack of cooperation was positively handicapping. 

In the meantime, flying without a light was probably a fair assessment of what they knew about the condition of Aileen, Abby, and others who had been affected by the pentrals.

"No idea, sir," he said, giving a half shake of his head.  "Whether for her or the others.  They all seem stable enough for now -- we haven't had an instance where someone seems to get worse, for example.  But we don't know enough to be able to wager on that not happening."

That was the difficult part about the pentral portion of the investigation.  Tracking down and identifying the Lillys -- that was the sort of case that Jonas knew well.  But dabbling in complicated, esoteric magic...that was something better left to Cursebreakers and Unspeakables.  Short of holing up in a library, it was difficult to know how to proceed.

"Right now, most of the pentrals that we've located inside wixes only seem to remember bits and pieces about who they were," he continued.  "Pulling any information out of them about who they were or how they were killed has been a struggle.  Meanwhile, they seem to have affected each of the afflicted a little differently.  We've had some who've lost all sense of themselves entirely and had their appearances change, while others are like Aileen Reid, with their memories all tangled up with those of the pentral but fewer physical changes."

Nobody was getting worse - and yet nobody was really getting better either. A lack of progress was no progress at all. They were navigating without a map. Solomon nodded as Trevelyan explained the various ways in which victims had been affected by these pentrals. Nothing exceedingly violent had yet to occur: but that was the thing. Yet.

"We must focus on keeping the public away from these pentrals then, in addition to the dementors." Sol sighed and reached for his tea the way he might have reached for whisky in the evening. "The last thing we needed was two uncontrolled entities terrorising the countryside but here we are."

He drank, thinking in the given silence. The Department of Mysteries was out of commission for now so they would have to rely on their other resources.

What a strange creature this Ministry could be: one of its levels falls and the others flounder. A weak point almost impossible to address. Funnily, level nine was probably the most independent of them all.

"I take it we're enlisting the Ministry librarians to help find what they can?" he held the cup between his hand, returning to their exchange with weary eyes. "Once Morgenthau - that's the fellow by the way - once he's settled, we can see what he has to say about these pentrals. Send him a few victims to stud-- to  question, perhaps. Hopefully he can set some of those Unspeakables to this task."

The red-haired Auror nodded, as he filed the name away for later.  Morgenthau.  It didn't sound familiar, but then, he'd rarely had interactions with the Department of Mysteries, and he'd spent more than a decade well apart from the Ministry.

"Be good to chat with the bloke once he starts.  And yeah -- they're trying to dig up what they can," he agreed.  "Aileen Reid was able to point us towards a couple of texts, though they haven't been very helpful.  But we'll keep looking."

There was more that he could have said -- such as the question of how to do right by the souls trapped as pentrals after they were separated from their living hosts, which was slowly starting to nag at him -- but it didn't seem the time or place to bring up concerns about ethics.  Those questions could wait until after the investigation had advanced, and they'd made progress in learning more about the strange spirits.

And then there was the possibility of getting at answers from another direction.

He paused, considering.  He'd lifted his own file once for an afternoon, back when Rosier had still been the Head of MLE and he could get away with it.  There'd been no mention of his dalliances with the Black Chimaera crowd in it then, but he didn't know if there were other records kept somewhere else. 

"There's another angle I'd like to take up, too," he said after a beat.  "We found a decent supply of potions and potion ingredients at the Lakehouse.  The Lillys had to be getting them from somewhere.  If we can track down their suppliers, we might be able to get a break."

There was something - if not many things - weighing heavily on the other side of this meeting, although Solomon couldn't hazard a guess. Perhaps Trevelyan was taking these pentral cases personally. If so, who could blame him? They all eventually got caught up in their own investigations and sometimes it was the only way to derive substantial results. You had to become emotionally connected to it and maintain objective distance at the same time.

When the silence was broken, however, it hadn't been was Sol expected.

"That sounds like a much more straightforward lead than anything else we have," he remarked with a grim smile. "They could have had a middle man but that would be more than enough to go on. Alright."

The older wizard met his gaze and nodded once. "Take it up. Do whatever you think you must Trevelyan, until we can get elsewhere with this pentral affair. I'll set up a meeting with Morgenthau when he's ready and able." They still had to set up a meeting between him and Miranda Storm; the whole Musgrave affair.

Solomon glanced down at the folder he'd been examining earlier.

"Is there anything else?"

Easy enough, it seemed.  That was certainly one way that working for the Ministry of Magic beat the days he'd spent hitting the streets as a private investigator.  There might occasionally be aspects of the job that didn't always sit so well with him here, but Level Two had access to resources and information beyond what he ever could have dreamed of when he was working independently.

Jonas shook his head.  "No, sir," he said, as he rose to his feet.  "We'll have more by the next time we chat."

At least there was an incoming supervisor for the Department of Mysteries; that would certainly be a positive improvement for investigations even beyond this one.  Before the new Department Head started, they'd make what progress they could with identifying the type of magic used to create the pentrals, and anything else that the Lilly siblings might have had their fingers in.

Giving Carstairs a nod, he quickly gathered his things, and headed back out of the Department Head's office.