My kingdom for a Longbottom, he thought upon hearing of a presence in the greenhouses. No, two presences.

Solomon had faith in Trevelyan - the redhead was experienced and sensible, exceptionally considerate for the well being of victims the DMLE came across in their pursuit of dark wizards. All the same, he wished a spare wand or two right now. They didn't know enough about their surroundings to confidently confront the likes of the Hunts.

             "Reckon we should finish clearing through here first, sir?"

A brief nod. It went unsaid that separating was an unwise idea. The two wizards finished their survey of the ground floor - preserves in the kitchen, again, signs of life. He never visited the lakehouse himself but he imagined it had a much stronger version of the sensation picked up here; walking into a place where terrible things have occurred.

On Sol's prompting, they checked upstairs next. The light in the window took priority over the basement; and anyway, he was wary of basements and underground rooms. Something about being in the soil.

The first of bedroom held little to examine but a single bed. In the second, Solomon paused to quickly check for enchantments and recently cast spells. "The Wolds didn't have an elf did they? Seems quite a bit of house elf magic here..." he glanced at Jonas as he trod carefully to avoid stepping on a family of toy ducks circling the centre of the room - always ducks!

There were toys scattered all over - many enchanted - and the bed indicated someone small had lived here. That was unnerving, even for him. A child's room, complete with pretty wallpaper, without a child in sight.

Solomon stopped at the nightstand to glance at an open book. He looked up abruptly and exchanged a look with Trevelyan. It wasn't strong, the scent, but it was growing stronger quite rapidly. Smoke.

As the Aurors inspected the child's bedroom, a few things happened at once.

Outside - a white glow filled each of the two greenhouses. The glass panes acted like a magnifying glass, brightening the wispy form growing within each garden.

Inside - the smallest toy duck broke away from the family of ducks and knocked into Solomon Carstairs' foot. It let out a loud quack and beamed a bright yellow light[1] directly at the unfortunate Auror.

1.	Ducks, always ducks

They'd climbed the stairs to the second floor, with Carstairs in the lead and Jonas behind. The red-headed Auror had kept a careful eye behind him, just in case whoever had apparated into the greenhouses decided to enter the cottage behind them, and his free hand on the bannister, to help keep the weight off his bad knee.

It was hard to judge which room the light had come from. Carstairs entered through the first door. Past him, Jonas could see what looked to be a child's bedroom, with a narrow bed and toys scattered across the floor.

As he began to follow the other wizard inside, with a quick glance to check once more behind them, something hanging on the back of the door caught his eye. Frowning, Jonas stepped over, pushing the door partially back so that he could fully examine it.

It was another cloak. Unlike the gray one hanging in the main living area down below, though, this one was red and child-sized, with an elongated hood lined with white felt triangles. Uneasily, Jonas reached out to touch two fingers to the hood, lifting it slightly so he could see the shape more clearly.

A memory rose unbidden in his mind: a young, eager boy with bright blonde hair and chubby cheeks that were almost as red as his dragon-hooded cloak, unaware of the solemn faces of his aunt and uncle as he raced around, shouting "Aura! Aura!" as he chased after his freckled sister.

"The Wolds didn't have a house elf, did they?"

The Department Head's words brought him suddenly back to the present.

"Not that I --" Jonas started to say, as he turned back to face the rest of the room. But just then, the faint, ashy smell of smoke hit his nose, and out the window, he caught sight of the glowing greenhouse.

Alarmed, the Auror stepped over to the window, leaving the child-sized cloak behind. From the second floor, he could see both greenhouses clearly. Both were glowing brightly, with a fierce light quickly expanding inside them.

Bloody hell. He very nearly fired off red sparks then and there. But they still didn't know exactly what they were up against, and every Auror knew what had happened during the Leaky Cauldron explosions over a year before. Calling in reinforcements when they didn't know for sure exactly what they'd walked into seemed incredibly dangerous.

He'd begun to glance back at Carstairs, to voice a warning about whatever was happening in the greenhouse, when a loud, high-pitched quack suddenly split the room. Jonas whirled just in time to see a bright yellow light shoot up from one of the toys on the floor directly at the other wizard.

He had been distracted by the contents of the book, intrigued by the changes that had clearly been made by a smart wand hand - Solomon was reminded of a similarly whimsical touch[1] a couple of years ago. Whimsical and theatrical. This was different; a softer touch than Almasy's, with hints of childlike wonder.

Qu-ack!

The wizard side-stepped, widely, almost stumbling and falling on to the small bed. He did not have to see the yellow light to know to act; a fellow need only once be turned into a duck - and haunted by such jokes - to be wary of a quack.

He pressed a hand against the wall behind the bed, bracing himself to regain stability with a glance at Trevelyan. "Think they were expecting me?" Sol's lips pressed into a grim and humourless smile, which turned darker as his eyes found the view from the window.

Careful not to trip over or instigate any other toys, he stepped back towards the table to shut the book and pick it up. They would be investigating the greenhouses and, on the off-chance something happened to this cottage, this was a piece of evidence Solomon wished especially preserved. It went into the inside of his jacket, which was enchanted to hold a great deal many larger things.

"We had better get down to the greenhouses." Solomon raised his eyebrows at Jonas - more query than statement. He deferred to his companion's judgement, not trusting his own ill humour to do with ducks. "Best to see what's happening before calling for assistance."

1.	24th Dec 2010

Carstairs dodged neatly out of the way of the burst of yellow light. A moment later, after a flick of Jonas's wand, and the attacking toy was hovering in mid-air, encased in what looked to be a bubble of shimmering, near-translucent water.

Judging by the speed at which the traps had been sprung, the Hunt siblings -- or whoever else had been living in the Wold family home -- had clearly been expecting someone. Jonas pressed his mouth shut as Carstairs stepped over to the table to pick up a picture book that was lying open. The smell of smoke was getting stronger, and they'd still seen no sign of the figure who had been detected by his Hominum Revelio spell, but the Department Head was right: they needed to see what was happening down in the greenhouses, and then they probably needed to summon help from the Ministry for backup.

Jonas cast a wordless glance back at the little red cloak hanging on the back of the door. He didn't know Carstairs' reasons for taking the picture book, but if the dragon-hooded cloak was the same as the one that he remembered belonging to Wyatt Wold, then he didn't want to risk it disappearing as they sprung the rest of this trap.

Silently, he flicked his wand. On the other side of the bedroom, the small cloak gracefully lifted itself off the peg and floated across the room to him, settling over his arm.

"I've got a bad feeling about this," he said without a trace of irony, glancing over to briefly meet Carstairs' gaze.

Then, with a crack, he apparated -- only to reappear a moment later on the patch of bare dirt between the two green houses, with the Department Head presumably a mere second behind him.

Light. Warmth. The spirt rushed over the flowers and vines and the black pots and the black soil that held them, and over the scratched and worn wooden table, finding warmth in each life, finding promises that everything was alive.

It could almost feel the metal of the greenhouse frame, and the caulking between the glass panels, and it could feel the heat and humid air beneath the glass, and the layer of shimmering magic coating the underside of the glass, and the sunlight pressing on the outside of the glass, and the sense of clouds in the distance, more substantial than the spirit's own form.

Every time the spirit reached for the glass, it felt warmer and brighter, but it couldn't find a way out. The door wouldn't budge. The rafters wouldn't shudder. There was only the narrow tube in the ground that the spirit had just escaped from.

Where was this and what was this? The pentral flitted to the other side of the greenhouse, trying to focus on what was less alive. The land was alive, but neglected. There was a cottage next door, made of old bricks, a patchy roof, and a window that looked into a child's room. The window where the pentral could remember looking out at the two glass houses.

The pentral fell away, clinging to the damp ground. It thought it had escaped the photograph of the sad cottage, the broken frame left in the dark below, but Lorelei Hunt had only trapped it here, in this same place, inside a larger glass frame.

It would never be home.

---

The other pentral couldn't go down into the grave, not with the little one sitting there, her not-quite-right-sized soul shining out of her big eyes. It was dark in the ground and the pentral wouldn't go down there again. It missed home, where there had at least been a warm fire and a family and the one that the pentral had loved most.

Its first trap had been the home that they'd shared, the sun a constant, false light in the sky. Only when she, Lore, had walked by with a light cupped in her palm, could the spirit feel what was on the other side of the hall. A night sky, framed against the black wall. A shadowed figure in the picture, always there, always watching. Its face and name a mystery.

The second trap had been smaller than the first. The pentral had made it smaller still, hiding in the cellar of that pale cottage. There were no windows in the cellar, and the pentral could pretend not to hear the tapping of Lore's fingers on glass.

So it knew this place, this third trap. It could almost feel the other greenhouse, and the rundown cottage next to it.

Most of all, it felt the other pentral, shining brighter than the sun in the sky.

Who was this? The pentral mimicked the other's movements, flitting to each wall and corner that the other went to, cheek to cheek, and continuing the dance even when the other sank towards the ground.

And who were these two figures between the glass houses? Light and warmth? Alive. Just like the girl and boy[1] who had freed them once.

---

While the bright mists beckoned and swirled in the two glass houses, a dark cloud gathered on the horizon.

The dark cloud split, and clawed one, then two, black scratches in the sky.

The black scratches grew cloaks and hoods, and floated over the barren land, over the corpses buried in the land, toward the glass houses in a silent rush of hunger.[2]

1.	Abby and Calix
2.	a pair of dementors

With a pop! pop!, they reappeared on the bare earth between the two greenhouses. Jonas shaded his eyes with his free hand as he squinted up at the one on the right, which was mostly free of greenery. This close, he could see that the fierce brilliance was coming from something inside the glass building, some bright streak of white light that was racing through it with a terrible speed, zigzagging as it ping-ponged to and fro from wall to ceiling to wall and back again.

Fascinated, the red-headed Auror stepped forward, letting his hand hover just next to the glass. What kind of terrible beacon spell was this? But no -- forehead creasing, Jonas tried to track the streaking source of the light with his gaze. It shone bright enough to be a patronus, but it gleamed white instead of silver, and though it was moving quickly, it seemed to have an amorphous shape, much like the wispy bursts that many young wixes managed as their first failed attempts at Expecto Patronum.

Was it a pentral?

The day had been cold and cloudy when they had arrived, but the weather had still been bearable. Now, as a dark cloud drifted across the horizon, the temperature seemed to be growing colder yet. Jonas shivered as he tugged his coat tighter around his shoulders. Whatever was raging inside the greenhouses, it was clear that their arrival had been expected: and that meant that somewhere he had gone wrong, that he had taken Wesley Wold's prophetic dream less seriously than he should have. It was the nagging fear of inadequacy that he'd never quite been able to shake, not since the awful day in the Ministry when he'd shown up to find half of the Auror Corps vanished and a summons on his desk commanding him to report to the courtrooms on Level Ten.

And now, if the child's dragon-headed cloak was any indication, he'd not only failed to do his job, but he'd very likely failed to protect the defenseless Wold family in the process.

A glittering web of ice crystals was creeping down the glass of the greenhouse. Jonas stared at it, not really seeing, as his own breath left a puff of bleak condensation in the suddenly icy air. There were so many things that had gone so wrong, and in the end, he knew what the common thread through them all was.

Behind the frozen glass of the greenhouse, the pentral was racing faster and faster, as if desperate to escape from a doom that was marching ever closer.

For most of his professional life, Solomon had simply put one foot in front of the other - stolidly, with the certainty that if he could just keep doing that then the enormity of his task might not be so overwhelming. Just one more step, one more step. A single step in itself was manageable and not particularly threatening.

But of course, every now and then, you might take a single step in the wrong direction. In one moment he was simply investigating a sequence of eerie events under the assumption that no truly vicious harm could befall the two men. Then, one step into apparating, he was suddenly in the end of days.

He pulled his tweed cap down over his eyes, grimacing against the chill. Frosted glass walls towered high above them - the glass carried a soft glow, at odds with the sharp wind tunnelled between the greenhouses. Solomon swore as he forced his eyes away. The glow came from shifting forces inside. At first he thought it was a patronus.

No, not a patronus. The old wizard could only guess from descriptions and written accounts but these must be Pentrals. It lent their experience even more surreality, to finally see one in-person.

"Dementors," Solomon's gaze had risen to the horizon and his mouth had forced the word out unconsciously. Any Auror of old would know this feeling which, for him, never altered - the glimpse of raggedy black cloth against the sky and the instant acceptance of a relentless opponent.

His heart dropped but this only served to force him into action.

"Jonas," he clapped a hand on the redhead's shoulder, serious. "I trust your judgement in this matter. Are we defending these Pentrals?" Sol wasn't sure if Trevelyan might know the identity of the Pentral, if they were one of those who might help them - like Iona without a body.

At the Black Chimaera, Lorelei stood beside Aviad and watched the scene unfold in his scrying mirror. Her gaze tracked every moment that could be caught between the foggy border on the edges of the mirror. Well done Aviad, she'd said earlier. Now bring me the scene again.

Her gloved hand still clutched the mirror shard she'd stolen from the Wold's farmhouse. In its reflection, a fire raged in the upper story of the cottage. Lorelei curled her fingers over the shard again and again, flashing the light at the pentral in her locket and the pentral in her head, barely cognizant of the warmth of the enchanted shard, or of the locket around her neck hanging limp and cold.

The dementors kept coming, drawn to the pulsing glow in the two greenhouses. More Ministry officials appeared on the farm, flinging gray-white patronuses at the dementors. Carstairs and Trevelyan must have called in help.

If they wouldn't believe a child like Wesley Wold, at least they believed their own eyes.

When the Aurors dispelled the wards around the greenhouses, the dementors surged forward, their ragged cloaks blotting the sky and their bony hands reaching for the same light and life. A wave of gray-white dancing creatures pushed them back. Patronus against dementor. She'd give them this - the Ministry had learned a lot these past few years.

The two pentrals floated out of the greenhouses. They soared down the path. There! The Aurors had left a gap for them to escape.

You've lost them. Two more you've lost, the pentral in her head crooned. Lorelei barely heard her, leaning toward the scene. Pentrals were who they were. They would feel the life around them.

They stopped in mid-flight. They were close now, to the line of Aurors defending them. Go on!

The two pentrals pushed back and forth at each other. They swirled together, shining brightly, their glow reflected on the outside of the greenhouse glass.

Lorelei cocked her head. What were they doing?

Their gap to freedom was closing - closed. The Aurors ran around like red ants, their line nearly breaking against the dementors. These pentrals were ignoring danger and life to embrace one another.

The embrace only lasted seconds.

In one rush, the pentrals turned on the closest human. Light! Life! They surrounded the human in a fog. All the shield spells in the world, the red robe, and the badge could not stop them. The other Aurors tried to defend their comrade. But they weren't prepared, Lorelei saw, to sing to souls, entice them, and give them somewhere safe and nice to nest that wasn't a body. Trick them, trap them, or they will always turn on you.

The human was on the ground. Alive? Dead? The remaining pentral pressed against the human, looking for its other half. The pentral circled the body, but there was no place for it to go, and the other Aurors were crowding in. Wands raised against the pentral they'd tried so hard to save.

Invade, Lorelei silently urged the pentral from afar.

The pentral did not. 

It streamed into the sky, following a patronus that was chasing a dementor. Lorelei almost laughed. Go on! Risk it!

The pentral veered just as the patronus dissipated. It flew to the cottage with the dementor on its tail.

It dipped in circles around the upper story, peeking into the child's bedroom - light? Life? Death. The dementor caught the end of the pentral. Took a deep breath.

The pentral fought, shuddered, slipped and shook free. It careened shakily around the cottage rooftop once more, its form becoming as gray as the smoke billowing out.

It flew above the bedroom where Lorelei had started the fire.

It paused for what felt like hours.

The dementor dove for it. The pentral dove - fell? - into the flames.

Lorelei squinted, even glanced at Aviad. Had that really just happened? The fire in the cottage kept raging. The dementor stopped short, mouth open in a silent scream. Then, too late, a patronus chased the dementor off.

Had the fire killed the pentral? Lorelei couldn't be sure. The reflection of the flames danced in her eyes as she leaned close to the mirror, her lips parted, about to smile.

In the end, the pentral had succumbed to its instincts. It hadn't flown into the sky, or into the grave, or into a person, or into a dementor, but into fire. The core of life.

Lorelei blinked back an itch in her eyes. Her brows rose at the front and her mouth tugged downward. Her face first felt the sorrow and tried to send it to her body, to make her know it, to match the foreign thoughts in her mind.

Lost... lost... separated forever. One lost to a body, the other to fire. The dementors were retreating, but the pentral in her mind had never been more present. Lorelei's cold hands clenched, the sharp shard digging into her palm.

This post is written from the point of view of Jeeny, the house elf.

Sometime later...

They'd found her. Someone had thought to ask where the pentrals had come from. They'd perhaps spotted the air holes poking out of the flower bed, or the loose paving stones beneath the table in the greenhouse. It had taken them time to reach her, but here she was. She heard them say that the ground floor of the house was still standing, the fire put out. Smoke drifted in the air, and the wind chime still rang on the porch.

They worried for their fallen. She didn't know, just by their words, if they meant their comrades were dead or alive, but altered, certainly, changed - yes.

The house elf held a broken picture frame in her hand. It showed a photo of the cottage and the bright white blot where the pentral had made its escape. Jeeny traced the initials -L.W.- on the back with her thumb. It was all she could do for it now.

Red-robed humans looked down at her. She thought she saw confusion on their faces, but also a touch of relief. It was just her. The Wold children were not here.

Time was the danger and the hope. Her final orders were to remain in this coffin, be silent, do nothing magical, and wait. The more time she had, the more hope she had that something within her would find freedom. Perhaps the damage to the cottage she'd lived in for several months would grant her freedom, or perhaps the absence of Lorelei and the locket around her neck.

She needed time, and she and Lorelei both knew it.

But with time, the danger grew. It grew along the walls of the soil. It grew in blood-red vines that crept around the edges of the wooden coffin and pushed against the slats beneath Jeeny's feet.[1] Far above, frost gathered on the glass panes, but here below the house elf's feet were growing warm. She shifted on her heels, then on her toes.

Had they found the other coffin yet? The one buried in the other greenhouse? Empty, save for the other broken picture frame?[2] She imagined it too, was cradled in vines. She sniffed the air, smelling no more smoke than usual.

If these humans would leave this greenhouse and this land that wasn't theirs, they would be safe.

Why she still cared, the house elf didn't know. She supposed it mattered, a little, that they had so carefully removed the dirt above her coffin, and had so carefully lifted the wooden lid to find her there. If they hadn't been so careful, she would not be looking up at them now and they would not be looking down at her.

Can you speak, one asked. Can you move, wondered another. She should stay there for now, the wariest said. The house elf remained silent, her face tear-streaked but her eyes dry. Look, you witches and wizards. Look at the sweat on her brow. Look at the size of the coffin, how spacious it was.

The wards around both greenhouses had fallen during the battle. They had fallen from above, from the sides, and below. 

Listen, the house elf wished she could say. Listen to the gnomes gleefully burrowing into the soil.

The house elf looked up at two new faces - one older man and one redhead. Unlike the others, they wore muggle clothes.

Leave! The house elf lifted her foot as if to stamp it, then thought better of it. She widened her eyes.

What could Jeeny do? What hadn't Lorelei thought of?

They only had a little time left.

1.	Someone familiar with herbology might recognize the vines as looking similar to a fire seed bush.
2.	The picture would show the cottage and the farm from another angle. Lorelei wrote the initials W.W. on the back

"Cheers, mate," Jonas said to the I.D.R.E.A.D. member, flashing them a tight, tired smile as he accepted the two paper cups full of hot chocolate.

The air was still thick with smoke and ashes, stinging at his nose and making his eyes water as he picked his way back to Carstairs. It felt much colder than it had when they'd arrived that morning, a conspicuous chill that still lingered even though the Dementors had been driven away.

They'd been lucky. He couldn't shake that thought from his mind. If they'd faced the same sort of trap that Bagnold and Blake had stumbled into in December, they wouldn't have been able to cast the red sparks[1] that had brought them help in the form of I.D.R.E.A.D.

No, the trap that they'd walked into had been deliberate and intentional -- even a bit cheeky and irreverent, with the references to the fairy tales that he still needed time to make sense of -- but they had still been lucky. It would have been very easy for the events of the day to have taken an even darker turn.

Still, it was impossible not to feel defeated. The remains of the Wold house were still standing, but most of the building was charred and blackened. The wind chimes hanging on the porch appeared to be one of the only features to survive intact, their sad, solemn sound tolling a death knell for the rest of the family's onetime home. It seemed likely that everything inside was ruined. Carstairs had rescued the picture book, and he'd taken the dragon-headed cloak, but all the rest of it -- the enchanted toys in the bedroom, the dried herbs on the ceiling, the gray cloak hanging on the hook...all had probably been destroyed in the fire, which had started upstairs. The only way that they'd be able to revisit those clues now was through a pensieve.

Whoever had been inside watching them when they'd first arrived had surely apparated away.

When the Dementors had appeared, the Aurors had taken a stand to defend the pentrals. The pentrals hadn't cared. One had turned on Dean Bailey, rushing in to take the Senior Auror by surprise while he'd been focused on the Dementors. The I.D.R.E.A.D. healers were seeing to their colleague now, preparing to take him to the Unspeakables so that they could start the long process of untangling two souls. The second pentral had gone diving into the flames, a Dementor close behind. Jonas would never know who they had been in life -- could never know their stories, not the same way that he'd come to know Iona McBoid and Lucy Wold -- but he still felt a strong feeling of sadness at their loss. They surely didn't deserve such a sudden end to their life or the long, lonely tail that had trailed behind them after death.

Carstairs had been left to himself for a moment, standing alone amongst the bustle of I.D.R.E.A.D. and Aurors and looking nearly as tired as Jonas felt.  The red-headed Auror stepped up to the Department Head and silently passed him one of the paper cups, steam rising from the hot, sweet liquid inside.

Jonas raised his own paper cup to take a sip, savoring the hot chocolate inside. He could feel the coursing warmth as he swallowed, a natural remedy to the chill that still lingered from such a close exposure to Dementors.

Someone cleared a throat in front of them. Jonas glanced up to see Auror Alan Childs, looking a little worse for wear but still dressed quite crisply in his crimson robes.

"We located what appears to be a large wooden coffin buried under each of the greenhouses," Childs said, far more to Carstairs than to Jonas. "I think you should come and see what we found inside one of them, sir."

And so they went: back inside the second greenhouse, mostly empty without the well-tended jungle of the first. Except now, the paving stones had been pried up and set aside and a section of the ground had been removed, all to exhume a wooden coffin that looked large enough to hold several bodies at once.

And inside it, dressed in grubby rags and clutching what looked to be something broken, was a gaunt house elf with a tear-streaked face.

Frowning, Jonas examined the small survivor for a moment and then cast a sidelong look at Carstairs beside him. Neither Wesley nor his family had mentioned owning a house elf, but there had been one at the Lilly Lakehouse. Abigail Reid had spoken of one called Jeeny, who appeared to have been in service to Lori Lilly up until the pureblood Squib's life and soul had been usurped by the Hunts. Carstairs had also noted the presence of house elf magic inside the house, although they hadn't had time to follow up on it.

Was this the house elf that had been enslaved by Lorelei Hunt and her brother? But if so, why on earth had she abandoned it here, hidden in a wooden coffin deep underground?

1.	During the Cold Moon ambush in December 2011, a magical dome had prevented the Ministry team from calling for help.

He was almost certainly getting too old for this. Not literally, thought Solomon, but in the marrow of his bones.

As far as close calls went, this had been one of the worser ones. They had been fortunate to be able to summon others, to summon I.D.R.E.A.D. He did not linger on that thought in the same way that he did not linger on the image of pentrals, burned into his mind, to be revisited only later when he was out of these bloody muggle clothes and in the safety of his own home.

Trevelyan approached with hot chocolate as the bustle of Aurors and Healers, once swarming around him, began their own trajectories away. He'd given orders, listened to accounts about the wizards who would be making the journey down to Mysteries for their exorcisms.

They didn't have much time to savour their drinks. Childs approached with word of another discovery.


A house elf. Solomon met Jonas' look for a second, then returned his attention to the poor creature in its makeshift hideout. The fairy tale book felt extremely present, enclosed by the inside pocket of his jacket.

This was likely the house elf who inhabited the burnt down cottage along with the Hunts. But why was it now here? He knew now that nothing incidental happened in connection with Lorelei - like in fairy tales, there was symbolism and purpose to even minute oddities. What kind of story was she trying to weave by leaving behind her house elf?

"Speak," Solomon asked of it, his own voice gentle. "Can you, or communicate in other ways?" And then, drawing on something anxious eating away at him, some old instinct: "Is this over?"

The two Aurors looked at each other, communicating silently as the others had. They cradled their cups of hot chocolate and stood tall in their coats, but their gazes were grim, much like hers.

They asked the same questions she'd already been asked. Until the last one - is this over?

The house elf thought of the two dead bodies in the field, buried some distance from the greenhouses and the cottage. It was over for the dead. One Legilimens, who Lorelei had kidnapped to save Leander. And one muggle, who had poked around the wards one day until Lorelei had invited him in from the cold.

What a dedicated person you are, Lorelei had greeted him, offering him tea and a spot by the fire.

The muggle had spoken of the strange lights and sounds that his father, Alan, kept ringing him about, and did Lorelei know anything about that? It was probably nothing, but he was worried about his father living alone out here. He hadn't seen him for the holidays, and he didn't visit often enough.

The house elf looked up at the sky and finally shook her head. Enough time had passed that she could pretend to have forgotten the question, she could pretend that she was shaking her head at the memory of the muggle thanking Lorelei for the last words he would hear. Lorelei had called him dutiful. A good son. He'd never noticed Jeeny on the cellar steps, tapping a warning every time Lorelei had lied.

What else?

Jeeny looked down at the ruined photo and the warped frame in her hands. A white circle blotted the image of the greenhouse and marked the pentral's escape. Lorelei hadn't told her what to do with the pentral's empty prison.

As she paused, the wood of the coffin radiated heat. The frame slipped a little from her fingers. The folks above seemed like good people. Dedicated, dutiful. Devoted.

Her hands trembling, the house elf slowly held the portrait over her head, looking at the Aurors with wide eyes. With one finger, she tapped the image of the land beneath the greenhouse. One tap. Then two.

There! Below us!

A low rumble shook the bottom of the coffin. The house elf kept her arms stretched up, the picture in her hands, and the hope in her mind - was it over?

Could it be over, without more death?