The last time Aileen Reid had visited the British Museum, she and her sister had caused a horde of mummies to rise from their sarcophagi and lurch after the mysterious tiny pyramid artifact Abby had brought in with her.[1] That had been a few years ago. As she walked through the foyer of the museum, ticket in hand, her dark winter cloak long and conspicuous and so very pureblood over a classic dress, she glanced into the corners of the ceiling (for that was where she imagined muggle cameras to be, blinking malevolently from the corners of her vision), and held her breath.

Aileen stepped into the great court area where the ceiling of glass arced above. She let out a relieved sigh. No guards were coming to take her away.

Sidestepping the groups of families, tourists, and children out on field trips, she strode directly to the circular reading room in the center of the court. Aileen paused just before the two grand staircases curving around the circular wall, and found the narrow, invisible bubble that the muggles swerved around instinctively. She stood within it. No one looked at her. She tapped her wand against the brick of the wall three times.

Above her head, the narrow poster on the wall grew and unfurled all the way to the floor. The poster split from its upper counterpart, and formed into a door with a knob.

Aileen opened the door and went into the wall and looked down into a curving staircase leading to the British Magical Library below.

She descended the stone steps of the dark passageway, lit by torchlight that let off no heat. Like she had years ago, she felt like she was delving into a chamber of the underworld. Though public, this library was perhaps the least friendly establishment in all of London.

Rumor had it that the bookshelves moved. They curved. They formed mazes. They slammed together. They dipped low and rose high.

And the books. The books! The books moved. Some flew. Some were chained to desks and bookcases. Some were scrolls that rolled away when anyone reached for them. Some were manuscripts with barbed borders.

And then there was the Head Librarian. The sphinx at the center of the labyrinth of knowledge.

Aileen reached the bottom step and walked through an archway painted in two colorful, curving wings that met at the top. Inside this round chamber of the library, the bookcases curved around and around like a coiled snake.

The thick glass underneath her feet magically absorbed the sound of her heels clicking against it. The glass floor rested flat atop a great, wide bowl that resembled, in shape, the glass ceiling she'd first seen in the great court above.

Below, beneath the glass, dark clouds rolled and tumbled in a red, hazy sky. A perpetual, otherworldly sunset.

Aileen kept her gaze on the shelves as best she could. She'd heard stories of those who stared too long into the red depths.

After a minute of walking along the outer edge of the round room, passing by doorways and other stairways, she found the Runes section she was most familiar with. Her fingers rested on a shelf of books labeled Spirit Symbolism and Sigils. As she slid out a few tomes to look through one by one, she listened to the rustling of parchment in the air and the rattling of chains in the distance and even further away, a low growl.

She stilled. Had some fool already angered the Head Librarian?

A voice broke through the quiet. Yes, someone had.

1.

oops

Kurby was beginning to think that coming here  instead of going through the Ministry library was a mistake.

The werewolf hunter had already been cautious about mixing work and his dabbling into investigating the mess at Grimshaw's, but after Nemo's run-in with Abigail Reid, he'd decided to erect a firm barrier between the two.  Even though he didn't really care if he had to bark at an Auror or two or field uncomfortable questions, it seemed like it was smarter not to tempt fate.

He'd come in early again anyhow, so ducking out of the Ministry and heading over to the British Magical Library on a slightly extended lunch break seemed like a reasonable excursion.  Besides, it gave him a chance to get away from Level Four and take a break from the ongoing uncomfortable situation in the Werewolf Wing.  As long as he got his goddamned work done, there was no reason he couldn't work a split shift that day.

The Magical Library, hidden within the British Museum, seemed at least as large as the collection in the Ministry, although it was even more spread out, with curving, twisting staircases and bookshelves that never seemed to be in the same place twice.  If a visitor didn't know what he or she was looking for, it could easily take days to track down a specific volume.  It didn't help that there seemed to be no consistent or logical order to the sorting system whatsoever.  The only way to find things quickly was to either get extraordinarily lucky or to rely on the help of the quizzical librarian.

Unfortunately, the librarian today seemed intent on being extraordinarily uncooperative.

"Look, I just want to bleedin' know where the hell old property records for Knockturn might be," Kurby snapped at the Sphinx, gesturing widely with his hands. "I know you've got 'em, I found the ones for Diagon already!  So why the hell do I have to guess your name before you'll tell me?!"

The growl that emanated from the Sphinx's human head was anything but pastoral.  The creature's long, almond-shaped eyes were half-closed, but she still managed to glare at him in such a way that made Kurby wish he'd bothered to bring his silver chain.  She flexed her claws, and then pointedly raised one huge, lion-like paw in his direction.

That was enough of a cue to decide that he was going to have to find some other way to explore the Library.  Rolling his eyes so that the Sphinx would know that he wasn't intimidated, Kurby backed away from it, conceding the point.  Sighing, he shoved his hands deep in the pockets of his cloak and looked up at the nearest bookshelf.  Without the help of a librarian, he was going to have to find some other way to locate what he needed here today.

Time magic. Song magic. Ghost magic. Real estate magic. The rune could mean all those things or something else entirely, her sister had said. The story itself was even more unbelievable, involving cursed flutes and an ossuary and a ledger that had flown open to display an endless list of names. Of course, stranger things had happened to the Reid sisters and those they called friends, and Aileen had offered to look into it, if only to give Abby something else to focus on this week, something benign. Aileen would happily bring her the history of enchanted flutes, or ghostly choirs throughout the ages, but if she found anything about the grittier, much more common history of young wixes ending up dead in Knockturn, she'd likely keep it to herself. This week, and the weeks after.

At Aileen's feet, the red clouds churned underneath the glass floors. She gave a slight shake of her head, skimming the spines of the books with a clear, purposeful gaze. Far too many titles had to do with haunted houses and haunted skips in time. Her finger paused over the few titles regarding musical instruments or 'haunted song magic', as Abby dubbed it.

She selected those few, and finally turned her head in the direction of the voice she'd overheard a few minutes ago. A grumbling, most unhappy voice peppered with bleedin' and hells and something about Diagon.

A voice that belonged to Kurby Bagnold.

After their ridiculous encounter in the lifts months ago with Pratt and the spiked chocolates, it would be more polite to leave him to his own devices. More polite and more preferable. She'd barely recognized him then, and had resented feeling so far out of her depth that day.

Still, he'd been at Grimshaw's on the night of the cursed flute, hadn't he? He'd helped Abby's mystery friend. The friend with no last name or any real identifying characteristics.

Aileen pursed her mouth thoughtfully.

Books in her arms, she moved down the silent corridor, catching a glimpse of the end of a lion's tail swishing past the stacks in the other direction. The librarian would appear again when they had answers to offer in exchange for their questions.

Aileen stepped through a gap in the bookshelves and into the next corridor of the stacks.

There was Bagnold, frowning up at one of the bookcases.

"Bagnold," she arched an eyebrow at the werewolf hunter. "I thought I heard your grumbling tones."

He'd been so annoyed with the current situation that he hadn't been paying attention to anything behind him, and the words caught him off guard.  Kurby looked back sharply at the sound of his name, his expression quickly becoming wary.

Aileen Reid.  The ex-wife of his cousin Oscar, and the elder sister of Abigail Reid, Nemo's star-crossed companion.  Although he didn't entirely put all of the fault on her, the blonde witch had been the catalyst for years of drama at family gatherings after she'd cheated on her husband and sent Oz into a decade-long spiral of romance-hating wretchedness.  The number of endless one-sided conversations Kurby and his other cousins had had to endure about how horrible marriage was, how true love was a sham, and how women could never be trusted to do anything but break hearts had almost made the werewolf hunter want to grit his teeth, stick a wand in his eye, and find some goddamned girl to propose to just so he wouldn't have to listen to Oz complain any more.

But now Oz was happily settled down with his new, petite pureblooded wife, who maintained a suspiciously strong resemblance to Aileen herself, and his endless droning had shifted from complaining about love to extolling the virtues of a perfect pureblooded match -- just as nauseating as before, but this time with extra hypocrisy.

That wasn't all the fault of the witch standing in front of him now, though.  Kurby regarded her warily, unsure of why she had approached him.  Her younger sister had threatened to go to the Aurors over the incident at Grimshaw's, and as Nemo had put it, Abigail knew ev-er-y-thing about his involvement that night.  If he blew Aileen Reid off, she might be quick to spur her sister to talk to someone officially.

"Well, theory confirmed, then," he said, cautiously guarded.  "Tell the Sphinx to be on better behavior and I won't have to talk so loudly."

Aileen raised her eyebrows, having expected a guarded reaction though not to this extent. What was Bagnold doing here, anyway? He had an entire Sphinx-free, muggle-free Ministry library at his disposal.

Perhaps that was the point. Perhaps he was looking for a rarer book, or he didn't want an official record of his search.

She glanced at the section of books he'd been glaring at, then back at him. Aileen hardly ever approached any of Oz's relatives, no matter how distantly related or how disinterested in personal drama they seemed. She knew well they'd been on the receiving end of Oz's past tirades about love and betrayal and how horrible she was, and there was no way she was inviting them to pick up where he'd left off whenever they got bored or annoyed.

Aileen shifted the books in her arms and let a smirk soften her aloof expression. She would make an effort if only to find out what nonsense her sister was tangentially involved in.

Tangentially, she hoped.

"The sphinx hasn't growled at me yet, though I'm sure scolding her would do it."

The librarian was likely thinking the very same thing about Bagnold's behavior.

"I take it you haven't dealt with her riddles before?"

She kept her tone light and the judgment off her face, having learned a thing or two from the pentral who had possessed her.

It was...odd to be engaged in a conversation with Aileen Reid.  Usually, the blonde witch acted like she couldn't care less who he was, although whether she actually didn't care, didn't actually know, or just didn't want to engage with Oz's family, Kurby had no idea.  But here she was, opening up a conversation with him and even managing to tone down her normally aloof expression.

It made him extremely suspicious.

"No, this is exactly how I like to entertain myself on every lunch break," he retorted, eyeing her carefully. 

She didn't even look like she was judging him for getting in over his head.  There was definitely something funny going on.  The most obvious explanation was that word had gotten from Abigail Reid to her older sister, who was now...being strangely pleasant with him?  He didn't goddamned understand it.

But now he was stuck in a conversation with her, and her last comment almost sounded like it could have been an offer to help.  Kurby sighed, and then gave her a look that was somewhere between exasperated and helpless.

"If you happen to know any of the answers, I reckon I'd be open to hearing 'em," he said, giving her a wary look.  "Or am I goin' to get my head bitten off for cheating if I ask you?"

Aileen held back a sigh, and glanced at the shelves of books he'd been frowning at. What did she care what he got up to during his lunch breaks? Apparently he spent his free time following youngsters into haunted dress shops. Not strange at all.

When he sighed instead, his expression struck her as almost funny. He did not want to be here, but he was here for a reason. He didn't know what to make of her initiating conversation with him, but he'd rather not call the sphinx. He asked for help, but...

His word choice! It was exactly the sort of thing that Oz would have said with a smirk. Aileen, the horrible cheater. Wasn't he clever.

"I doubt it," she replied in her usual cool, aloof tone. "You're in the wrong section for decapitation."

Normally, she would have walked away and let Bagnold sort it out on his own. Intentional or subliminal insult aside, she had no interest in pushing past the walls of someone so wary and suspicious. She had her own up. But that wouldn't help her find out what he knew.

"When I was last here," a few years before she'd woken up the ancient pharaohs, "It didn't seem to matter who gave the answer, although my colleague and I were both looking for the same thing."

She arched an eyebrow at him, shifting the small weight of the books in her arms. Worth a shot.

There probably was a section in this ridiculous place on decapitation.  Kurby rolled his eyes, irritated that he was having to navigate this at all.  Libraries were a problem for Cursebreakers, Unspeakables, and Aurors; normally, all he had to worry about was using his wits to keep the monster of the month from sinking its teeth into him.

He would have expected Reid to take a few quick shots at him and then move on, but here she still was, now making a much more blatant offer to help.  The werewolf hunter eyed her for a moment longer, his brows knitting. 

This whole exchange seemed decidedly out of character.  Even when they were all more than a decade removed from Hogwarts, there were still adults in magical society who never escaped the stereotype of their school house.  Icy, aloof Aileen Reid seemed the epitome of Slytherin, and he found it hard to believe that she’d go out of her way to offer him assistance unless she was planning to get something of her own out of the situation.

Kurby tilted his head to the side, briefly considering her last words. 

“Are we lookin’ for the same thing, then?” he asked bluntly, quirking an eyebrow at her.  He didn’t have any patience for Slytherin-esque word games; whatever the undercurrent was here, he wanted to know it.  “Not that I mind the advice, but you don’t seem the sort to wander about giving away free Sphinx survival tips without havin’ some other interest in it.”

She smirked a truly Slytherin-smirk. Who had time for that? To be helpful, to put others first. She looked out for herself and her family, and had at one time looked out for her students. She tended to put her sister above everyone else, even herself, because no one else in the Reid family would. Which was why she was standing here, in the library in the first place, making conversation with scowling, eye-rolling Bagnold.

He looked so guarded and so wary that she sighed, tilting the stack in her arms to show him the top book, the one with a violin and an oh-so-helpful ghostly illustration on the cover. The book in the middle of the small stack held metal, musical notes that slotted together to form ghost songs and old hymns to the underworld. As she shifted her stance, one of the notes caught on her sleeve and let out a soft hum.

She paused, momentarily disconcerted by the sound as she studied his expression. "Now you'll tell me you're actually here to find property records for Diagon."

Musical magic.  For a moment, he’d thought he’d misjudged the situation, because he couldn’t guess what a ghostly violin had to do with anything at Grimshaw’s.  But a moment later, he realized the connection: Nemo’s magical bone flute, the one that had started to glow as they’d gotten closer to the tailor shop, that had had the same symbol carved on it that they’d seen next to some of the names in the ledger.

Reid was watching him as carefully as he’d regarded her a moment before.  It made Kurby feel distinctly uncomfortable; a large part of him wanted to deflect, to mouth off at her about something unrelated so that he had the chance to retreat and disappear.  If he had to, he could muddle his way through the situation at Grimshaw’s without diving more into the history of the shop.  He still doubted that whatever had lured him and Nemo there had any sort of positive intentions towards them, but he also felt reasonably certain that he could probably survive it.

But there was something tempting about giving in.  Nemo was still the only one he’d talked to about what had happened at Grimshaw’s before the full moon.  As spunky as the teenager was, her biggest contributions so far were blabbing to her mate and then helping to prepare dinner.  Having another fully-fledged wix to help him navigate through this — especially someone like Aileen Reid, whom he knew dabbled in cursebreaking and ancient magic — would at least mean that this was one less problem that he’d have to shoulder all alone.

Kurby hesitated, indecision warring visibly in his expression.  Finally, cautiously, he met her gaze, dark eyes wary.

“Abigail told you about the shop.”  He left that as a statement, rather than as a question.  Nemo had told her friend, and then Abigail had told her older sister.

Mouth pressed tightly shut for a moment, Kurby crossed his arms against his chest.  “I wanted to see if I could find any records of who owned the property in Knockturn,” he said quietly.  “Reckoned this was a place to start.”

Aileen nodded, her eyebrows lifting slightly as she considered his phrasing. Abigail had told her. Bagnold made no mention of the mystery friend, the supposed link between himself and the shop and her sister. More and more she wondered whether the friend was real, or if Abby had invented a buffer to get Aileen to help without questioning what she was involved in.

The suspicion took root in her thoughts as Bagnold made the astonishing decision to confess his plans rather than grump at her until she left.

She glanced at him distractedly, noting his crossed arms.

"It's a practical start," she lowered her voice to a quieter tone. "Might prove more fruitful than looking for a random glyph, though I've only just started."

She had questions about the glyph, of course, but those could wait.

"Your best bet for property records would be Gringotts, if the shop was ever bought and sold legally," she raised a skeptical eyebrow at him. Potential ghosts and curses certainly complicated things.

"The shop goes back hundreds of years, according to the ledger? There should be something of its history in newspapers and advertisements."

She moved past the section he'd been frowning at and paused, trying to remember which antechamber held the enchanted printing press. Beneath her feet, the cloudy shapes under the glass floor morphed into a crumbling, cobblestone pattern.

Aileen glanced quickly at him over her shoulder. Trust her memory or find the sphinx? They might be here a while.

He was feeling definitively out of his element now, and the surety with which Aileen Reid ran through her list of ideas wasn't helping.  It was clear that this -- diving into esoteric mysteries, investigating the obscure -- was something that she dealt in regularly, whereas the most complicated questions that he regularly puzzled through involved figuring out who was lying about not turning furry during the last full moon or trying to make sense of whatever bewildering Muggle nonsense Harris was currently on about. 

Kurby opened his mouth, and then shut it again.  Property records at Gringotts.  That made sense, although he didn't really want to bring his questions about Grimshaw's anywhere near the goblins. 

And then Reid offhandedly mentioned the ledger, and the werewolf hunter instinctively flinched.

Ev-er-y-thing, Nemo's chagrined voice rang out in his head.

"Yeah, uh..."  Kurby swallowed, and then mentally steadied himself.  He'd already decided to do this, and thanks to Nemo's teenaged tendency to overshare, Aileen Reid clearly knew plenty of details about their misadventure in the tailor shop.  Equally obviously, she had a better sense than he did about where to start looking.

"The first few pages looked like they were dated to the 1400s," he said, moving to catch up to her.  Reid was a bit taller than he was, but he easily quickened his stride to match her pace.  "It seemed like the entries were pretty steady over the years.  The most recent one that we saw was from a couple of weeks before, in early November."

Had Kurby Bagnold just flinched? How strange. Aileen had no intention of biting his head off unless she discovered that it was indeed her sister running off on possessed little adventures in the middle of the night while Bagnold encouraged it for some Merlin-forsaken reason. If that were true, any yelling would have to end with a barely audible and reluctant 'thank you' for pulling Abby out of the bone pit.

When had her life gotten so complicated?

She eyed him with faint suspicion as he confirmed a few details about the ledger. In Diagon, many buildings dated from the 1400s and many shops kept the same family name, but it was unusual to find a shop in Knockturn that had lasted for hundreds of years, even if it were family-run. From what she understood, shops in dodgy areas popped up and disappeared and changed hands often.

Had anyone owned Grimshaw's tailor shop before it had become Grimshaw's? Who was Grimshaw? Perhaps they could find out.

"Abby mentioned the entries very vaguely," Aileen nodded.

"She said the glyph was next to certain names, though she didn't mention a pattern or any other pattern that she could tell."

She paused, balancing her books in one arm and unfolding the note that Abby had given her. The glyph was drawn in sparkly green ink in the middle of a small piece of notebook paper. Her mouth pursed, glancing at it. Impossible to tell whether it had been drawn by Abby or another.

"Does this look right to you? Found in the ledger and on the flute?" She showed him, curious whether he'd seen it anywhere else.

'Vaguely' was either a polite way of avoiding mentioning the one name in the ledger that was a sore subject for him, or it meant that either Nemo or Abigail hadn't seized on his familial connection.  Either way, Kurby would take it, a discretion that would keep him from feeling even more awkward than he did currently.

He gave Reid a sideways look at her comment about the patterns in the book.  The way that she'd phrased that, it almost sounded as if she thought that Abigail had been the one to examine the list of names.  What exactly had her sister told her?  Had the Squib girl mentioned Nemo at all, or inserted herself into the story?

The witch had stopped, and then unfolded a piece of Muggle-looking paper with a trident-like symbol drawn on it in sparkly green ink.  Kurby took the paper from her, examining it carefully for a moment.

"You got a quill?" he asked, glancing up at her.

As Reid handed one over, he studied the symbol again, and then carefully flipped it the other way around, so that the squared-off rungs were at the top.  He then added three horizontal hash marks partway down the center line, directly below the bisected circle.

"Yeah," he agreed, passing the paper and the quill back to her.  "And down on the floor in the ossuary, too."  He rolled his shoulders in a shrug, raising an eyebrow as he glanced at her.  "The last couple names in the ledger had the symbol marked next to them -- a small-time Knockturn criminal and some witch that the Ministry's been lookin' for in conjunction with those pentral things -- but I didn't notice any pattern to which names had it, either."

Bagnold had seen the symbol in the ossuary as well. Ominous. Aileen was glancing down at the glyph he'd just embellished, trying to think if she recognized it from anywhere, when Bagnold said something incredibly alarming.

The most recent ledger entry showed the name of a witch wanted in connection to the pentral problem?

She stilled, then looked up and met his gaze. The flicker of concern in her eyes was her own, hinting at no other presence except the lack of one. In the strange firelight of the library, her icy blue eyes reflected the warmer colors of their surroundings, covering a loss.

"You know of them. The criminal and the witch," she stated, feeling out of her depth now.

Aileen wanted to demand to know several things, but knew it would get her exactly nowhere. He'd worked at the Ministry for years with all its hidden politics and plots and intrigues, and she had been out of the loop for a long time. She opened her mouth, then shut it, holding onto patience for a moment.