Chapter 21

..... Esme and Sirius crept out of hiding in Buckbeak’s stable. Two Ministry of Magic officials had come to inspect the battle magic damage on the roof and they had escaped as quietly as was possible. They had gone to the stable and then had to hide from Hagrid when he came to check on Buckbeak. The hippogriff had been glad to see Sirius and had given Esme a very careful looking over. With the Bind gone, her miasma had vanished, and Buckbeak allowed her to be set beside him.

..... Sirius propped her up against Buckbeak’s gray flanks. She had recovered enough to sit up and was wrapped in one of Buckbeak’s blankets. The hippogriff inspected her again, giving her tennis shoes a light peck and nibbling on a lock of her hair. She was too shaky to flinch from him and after a moment, he lost interest and turned back to Sirius to get his head scratched.

..... “So,” Esme said. “The kid with the glasses. He’s the godson you were talking about?” Sirius nodded. “I’ve heard of a boy with a lightning scar. The boy who lived, right?”

..... “You can’t tell me you were never in any danger from Voldemort, even overseas...” Sirius pushed Buckbeak’s head out of the way so he could look at her.

..... “True,” she sighed. “He might have been content to just conquer this continent, but nobody on our side of the pond was going to chance it. He just never made it that far.” She paused, then tilted her head to look at him with a trace of her old mischief. “So, how did you get a famous godson?”

..... “I knew his parents,” Sirius said, hiding behind Buckbeak again. “His father was my best friend.”

..... “Cyrus isn’t your real name, is it?” she asked. He narrowed his eyes at her and almost smiled.

..... “Is Esme yours?” he asked back, remembering her talent for answering questions with more questions. Her lips pulled upward as well.

..... “Sort of,” she admitted. “I’m named for my great-aunt Esmeria.”

..... “That’s pretty...” he said. “Sort of...”

..... “Esme suits me better,” she said, very nearly chuckling.

..... “I think so, too,” he agreed. They both managed real smiles for a moment, then Esme looked sly again.

..... “You’ve dodged my question beautifully,” she said. “Just tell me what you want me to call you.”

..... “Sirius,” he said after a long pause.

..... “Very well,” she seemed satisfied with that. She was quiet for awhile, and Sirius kept himself occupied fussing over Buckbeak. He noticed that some color had found its way back to Esme’s face, and her eyes looked a little brighter.

..... “What are you going to do now?” he asked her. She was silent for another moment.

..... “With the Bind removed, I can attack Ficus directly,” she finally said. “Whatever is left of Brohm must be destroyed if Lorey is to recover completely. “

..... “She blames you for what happened to her, you know,” he said, curious as to what her side of the story was.

..... “It was my fault,” she said simply.

..... “What happened?”

..... “Lorelei was always so rule-bound, and I really wasn’t...I knew she’d report me for running off to play with the werewolves so I told her I was going to see a voodoo witch raise a zombie in the Riomuerte Cemetery.”

..... “You can’t raise the dead,” Sirius started to argue, but she held up a finger to shush him. It was the largest movement she’d made without help since the curse.

..... “Theoretically, no. But you can animate dead flesh,” she explained. “It’s really not that different than enchanting an inanimate object.”

..... “Have you done it before?” he asked. She looked genuinely aghast.

..... “Of course not! have you ever met a zombie?? The smell alone will send you running. I’ll stick to the inanimate, thank you very much!” she shook her head, but carefully. “You’d think zombies would be more useful up north where it’s dry and cold and they would keep longer. But for some reason, you usually only find them in swamps and jungles where it’s hot and wet and various molds and maggots infest them in a day or two. Yech!

..... “But anyway, it was my excuse that I wanted to see it done to compare it to Personalification of other things. I knew perfect Miss Lorelei would never stand for it and I was sure that while she was leading some authority figure through the tombstones at Riomuerte, I’d be safely out with Rosie and Tanner.” Esme paused and ran a hand through her tangled ponytail.

..... “The thing is, Lorey went alone to stop me,” she said more softly. “And it wasn’t a voodoo ceremony she interrupted, but a vampire party. There was one...named Gaston. I’ll admit he was handsome, in a spoiled, pretty-boy kind of way. His talent was smooth-talking and he enspelled Lorey and delivered her as a gift to his master. It took us over a year to find her. By then, she was just a thin, pale thing, more ghoul than human. It took three teams of magical doctors to nurse her back to something near health.”

..... “Why didn’t she become a true vampire?” Sirius asked, uncertain if the question would upset her.

..... “They never let her have blood to drink,” she said. “They probably meant to torment her, but in the end that’s what saved her from unlife.”

..... There was another long pause.

..... “I remember when we found her...” Esme went on again. “Those starving red eyes burning in my poor sister’s face...She was half out of her mind from the dark and the pain. I’m not even sure she knew who I was, but she knew she hated me....”

..... “That’s just guilt talking,” Sirius said kindly. She shook her head again.

..... “No. The guilt came later when she told us what happened. We hadn’t known, y’see... No one knew. Vampires are secretive. Keeping a witch as a blood doll would’ve landed them all in loads of trouble with the magical community. So, they stashed her away until we could get a magical locator strong enough to find her.”

..... “She thought you’d sent her there on purpose...” Sirius guessed and Esme nodded.

..... “She never said so,” Esme sighed. She kept her eyes on her feet. “But it was pretty obvious that she couldn’t bear the sight of me. I tried to make her talk to me and she just screamed until our parents dragged me away. They screamed at me too, for upsetting her, but I was crying too hard to care. Rosie and Tanner were the only ones who’d tolerate me after the story got out. Then, Tanner got his grubby hands on a copy of the Mayhem Manual and we found the cure.

..... “There was no guarantee it would work, of course...so...we caught some weaker vampires and tested it. The younger one did become more human after we force-fed it some of its master’s blood, so we decided that it was worth a shot.”

..... “How did you find the one who’s bitten her?” Sirius asked. “Gaston, you said?”

..... “Easy,” she looked him in the eye again. “I dolled myself up all Wednesday Addams-”

..... “Who?” Sirius wondered if it was a name he should know, but she only shrugged.

..... “Nevermind. All pale and tragic and morbid. Then I went back to Riomuerte after dark and pretended to be some anguished poet. Rosie and Tanner came as back-up, but stayed out of sight. Gaston showed up in his leather and suede and took an interest. I crucified him to one of the yew trees there and made him talk. He told me Lorey had been given to Vanessa’s great-grandsire Brohm.

..... “Gaston was easy. I bled him and let the morning sun do the rest. He told me all kinds of things to save himself, but I let him burn anyway. He told me about Vanessa, beautiful and doting, but strict. There was a weird, ‘Mommy’, thing going on between them, I think. Tracking her down took a few months. She lived in an estate in the country with its own menagerie, and every single animal in it was a predator of some sort. Her favorites were this pair of tigers that she’d bent to her will. Controlling animals was her knack. It was another three weeks of just being careful and patient to get close to her.... And a full six months to recover from it once I did. I killed her... but only just barely.” She looked sideways at Sirius.

..... “Have you ever fought a vampire?” she asked. He said he hadn’t, and she nodded to herself. “I thought not. They’re like cats on crack when they decide to fight back.”

..... “Cats on WHAT?” Sirius found himself asking.

..... “Nevermind,” she said again. “They’re just a whirlwind of psychotic claws and teeth and ten times the strength they should have. The tigers were EASY compared to Vanessa. The wolves got me away to heal me up, and as I said, that took about half a year. Once I was able to get around again, we had Opal to deal with. She was 300 years old and Vanessa had been her favorite.

..... “Tanner was nearly killed that time, but we managed it again. It was hard because she looked so young... little older than a child. But the wolves pulled her down, and I took off her head. That awful, sweet-faced head screamed for a full minute after she was dead. I let it bleed over a bowl and set it down and it went leaping over the floor to rip into Tanner’s throat. Rosie and I burned it, the body, and the chalet she’d been lairing in.

..... “Am I boring you?” Esme asked suddenly. Sirius shook his head.

..... “Not at all,” he told her. “I’ve been so long in getting any kind of explanation out of you, I’m not about to tell you to shut up now.” She looked a little embarrassed at that, but went on telling the story anyway.

..... “Nathiel and Brohm took the most planning. They were in a huge Muggle city, posing as humans. Most vampires are a territorial bunch. They stake out areas for themselves and try to keep others out. But those two worked together so well, I guess they decided the city was big enough for both of them. Brohm was the oldest and Nathiel, the only survivor of all the old one’s children. Brohm was a mob boss and Nathiel was the enforcer.” Sirius didn’t know quite what she meant by that, but nodded encouragingly anyway.

..... “I moved to the city, pretending to be a Muggle,” Esme continued. “ I trained to be one of their law enforcers, which is a lot like being an Auror, only no magic, of course, and a lot more rules. I lived there a year, researching and trying to find the two of them. I tricked Nathiel, and got him in his own bed.”

..... Sirius raised his eyebrows at that, but she wasn’t looking at him anymore. She was looking across the stable, but not seeing that either. Her mind was reliving the hunt.

..... “By then,” she said. “Brohm had figured out what was up and had acquired some outside help.”

..... ‘Ficus, “ Sirius guessed.

..... “Right. I put a stake through the old leech’s heart, but it didn’t stop him. That’s just a myth, you know... Vampires are dead, and their hearts don’t beat, so they don’t need it to pump blood, so they really don’t care if you skewer it. It’s a useless part of their anatomy. We had to pin him and cut his throat, which was no easy task. He was ready for us too. When his blood splashed on me, it sank in and became the Bind.”

..... “Shouldn’t your sister’s cure still work though?” Sirius asked. “If she drinks the blood?”

..... “I don’t know for sure,” Esme’s blue eyes came back to his. “His blood is taken and his body is dust, but Brohm still exists.”

..... “Where does Ficus keep what’s left of him?” wondered Sirius. Esme sighed wearily.

..... “I don’t know that either. I don’t know where, or what keeps him alive. Vampire spirits aren’t like human ones. They must feed on SOMEthing to exist.”

..... Buckbeak suddenly looked up at the door. Sirius dove for Esme, scooping her up in a scramble to hide. He tossed her into a pile of straw before she could even gasp and pulled a few armfuls down to cover them both. Buckbeak looked as amused as a hippogriff could at their behavior. From outside, there came several thumps and scrapes and then the door flew open to show Hagrid. The Groundskeeper whistled cheerily to Buckbeak and threw an extra blanket over him.

..... “Now, you just sit tight there,” he said. “I’ll be coming back to sit out the night with you. There’s things afoot out there. Now, I’ll be right back, just as soon as I lock up my cottage. Oh, and I need to see what young Raye wants with my crossbow...” The big man gave Buckbeak a pat and went on out again.

..... “Raye has a crossbow?” Sirius repeated to Esme when Hagrid was out of earshot. She looked blank.

..... “Who’s Raye?” she asked.

..... “From what I’ve seen of her, she’s no one who needs to be armed!” he said. “Harry says she wants to be a Vampire Hunter. I thought you were the one she was writing to at first.”

..... “Not me,” she said. “I didn’t advertise.”

..... “Well, as dangerous as it will be with that girl and her weapon on the loose,” Sirius sighed. “It would still be better than being stuck here all night for a Hagrid/hippogriff sleepover. Shall we move on?”

..... “I’m never going to get any rest, am I?” sighed Esme. “All right, lead the way.”

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