Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (182 page)

“I knew it,” Hagrid murmured. “There’s summat in here that shouldn’ be.”

They went after where the rustling sound had come from, with Hagrid in the lead and Tracey and Draco both gripping their wands at the ready, but they found nothing, despite searching in a widening circle with their ears straining for the faintest sound.

They walked on through the dense, dark trees. Draco kept looking over his shoulder, a feeling nagging at him that they were being watched. They had just passed a bend in the path when Tracey yelled and pointed.

In the distance, a shower of red sparks lit the air.

“You two wait here!” Hagrid shouted. “Stay where yeh are, I’ll come back for yeh!”

Before Draco could say a word, Hagrid spun and crashed away through the undergrowth.

Draco and Tracey stood looking at each other, until they heard nothing but the rustling of leaves around them. Tracey looked scared, but trying to hide it. Draco was feeling more annoyed than anything else. Apparently Rubeus Hagrid, when he had formed his plans for tonight, had not spent even five seconds visualizing the consequences if something actually went wrong.

“Now what?” said Tracey, her voice a little high.

“We wait for Mr. Hagrid to come back.”

The minutes dragged by. Draco’s ears seemed sharper than usual, picking up every sigh of the wind, every cracking twig. Tracey kept looking up at the moon, as though to reassure herself that it wasn’t full yet.

“I’m -” Tracey whispered. “I’m getting a little nervous, Mr. Malfoy.”

Draco thought about it a bit. To be honest, there
was
something… well, it wasn’t that he was a coward, or even that he was scared. But there had been a murder at Hogwarts and if he’d been watching himself in a play, having just been abandoned in the Forbidden Forest by a half-giant, he would currently feel like yelling at the boy on stage that he should…

Draco reached into his robes, and took out a mirror. Tapping the surface showed a man in red robes, who frowned almost immediately.

“Auror Captain Eneasz Brodski,” the man said clearly, causing Tracey to start with the loudness in the quiet forest. “What is it, Draco Malfoy?”

“Put me on ten-minute check-in,” Draco said. He’d decided not to complain directly about his detention. He did
not
want to look like a spoiled brat. “If I don’t respond, come get me. I’m in the Forbidden Forest.”

Inside the mirror, the Auror’s brows rose. “What are you doing in the Forbidden Forest, Mr. Malfoy?”

“Looking for the unicorn-eater with Mr. Hagrid,” Draco said, and tapped the mirror off, putting it back in his robes before the Auror could ask anything about detentions or say anything about serving it out without complaining.

Tracey’s head turned toward him, though it was a little too dim to read her expression. “Um, thanks,” she whispered.

The few leaves which had emerged on their branches rustled as another, colder breeze blew through the forest.

Tracey’s voice was a little louder when she spoke again. “You didn’t have to -” she said, now sounding a little shy.

“Don’t mention it, Miss Davis.”

The dark silhouette of Tracey put her hand to her cheek, as though to conceal a blush that wasn’t visible anyway. “I mean, not for
me
-”

“No, really,” Draco said. “Don’t mention it. At all.” He would have threatened to take out the mirror and order Captain Brodski not to rescue
her,
but he was afraid she would consider that flirting.

Tracey’s silhouetted head turned from him, looked away. Finally she said, in a smaller voice, “It’s too soon, isn’t it -”

A high scream echoed through the woods, a not-quite-human sound, the scream of something like a horse; and Tracey shrieked and ran.

“No, you numbskull!
” yelled Draco, plunging after her. The sound had been so eerie that Draco wasn’t certain where it came from - but he thought that Tracey Davis might, in fact, be running straight toward the source of that eerie scream.

Brambles whipped at Draco’s eyes, he had to keep one hand in front of his face to shield them, trying not to lose track of Tracey because it seemed obvious that, if this was a play, and they got separated,
one
of them was going to die. Draco thought of the mirror secured within his robes but he somehow knew that if he tried to take it out one-handed while running, the mirror would inevitably fall and be lost -

Ahead of them, Tracey had stopped, and Draco felt relieved for an instant, before he saw.

Another unicorn lay on the ground, surrounded by a slowly widening pool of silver blood, the edge of the blood creeping across the ground like spilled mercury. Her coat was purple, like the color of the night sky, her horn exactly the same twilight color as her skin, her visible flank marked by a pink star-blotch surrounded by white patches. The sight tore at Draco’s heart, even more than the other unicorn because this one’s eyes were staring glassily right at him, and because there was a -

- blurring, twisting form -

- feeding on an open wound on the unicorn’s side, like it was drinking from it -

- Draco couldn’t understand, somehow couldn’t recognize what he was seeing -

-
it was looking at them.

The blurring, seething, unrecognizable darkness seemed to turn to regard them. A hiss came from it, like the hiss of the deadliest snake which ever had existed, something more dangerous by far than any Blue Krait.

Then it bent back over the wound in the unicorn, and continued to drink.

The mirror was in Draco’s hand, and it remained lifeless as his finger mechanically tapped at the surface, over and over.

Tracey was holding her wand now, saying things like “Prismatis” and “Stupefy” but nothing was happening.

Then the seething outline rose up, like a man rising to his feet only not so; and it seemed to scuttle forward, moving with a strange half-jump across the dying unicorn’s legs, approaching the two of them.

Tracey tugged at his sleeve and then turned to run, run from something that could hunt down unicorns. Before she could take three steps there came another terrible hiss, burning his ears, and Tracey fell to the ground and did not move.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, Draco knew that he was about to die. Even if the Auror checked his mirror this very instant, there was no way anyone could get here fast enough. There was no
time.

Running hadn’t worked.

Magic hadn’t worked.

The seething outline came closer, while Draco tried, in his last moments, to solve the riddle.

Then a blazing silver ball of light plunged out of the night sky and hung there, illuminating the forest as bright as daylight, and the seething outline leapt backwards, as though in horror of the light.

Four broomsticks plunged out of the sky, three Aurors with bright multicolored shields and Harry Potter holding his wand aloft, seated behind Professor McGonagall within a larger shield.

“Get out of here!” roared Professor McGonagall -

- an instant before the seething thing gave forth another terrible hiss, and all the shielding spells winked out. The three Aurors and Professor McGonagall fell off their broomsticks and dropped heavily to the forest floor, lying motionless.

Draco couldn’t breathe, the most intense fear he’d ever felt in his life gripping all through his chest, sending tendrils around his heart.

Harry Potter, who had remained untouched, silently guided his broomstick toward the ground -

- and then leapt off to stand between Draco and the seething outline, interposing himself like a living shield.

“Run!” said Harry Potter, turning his head half-back to look at Draco. The silver moonlight gleamed on his face. “Run, Draco! I’ll hold it off!”

“You can’t fight that thing alone!” Draco cried aloud. A nausea was in his stomach, a churning sensation that, looking back in memory, seemed both like and unlike a sense of guilt, as though it had the sensations but not quite all of the emotion.

“I must,” Harry Potter said grimly. “Go!”

“Harry, I - I’m sorry, for everything - I” Though later, looking back, Draco couldn’t quite remember what he’d meant to apologize for, maybe it’d been that he was planning to overthow Harry’s conspiracy, all that time ago.

The seething figure, now seeming blacker and more terrible, rose up into the air, hovering off the ground.

“GO!” shouted Harry.

Draco turned and fled headlong into the woods,with the branches whipping at his face. Behind him, Draco heard another terrible hiss, and Harry’s voice rising, crying something that Draco couldn’t make out from the distance; Draco turned his head for only an instant to look back, and in that moment ran into something, hitting his head HARD, and blacked out.

Harry held a tight grip on his wand, a Prismatic Sphere glowing around him. He stared levelly at the seething, blurring form in front of him, and said, “What on Earth are you doing?”

The seething blurs resolved, reformed, relaxed back into a hooded form. Whatever concealment had been at work - a device rather than a Charm, Harry guessed, since the magic had been able to affect him - had prevented his mind from recognizing the shape or even that the shape was human. But it hadn’t prevented Harry from recognizing the sharp sense of doom.

Professor Quirrell stood straight with silver blood all down the front of his enshrouding black cloak, and gave a sigh, looking at the fallen forms of three Aurors, Tracey Davis, Draco Malfoy, and Professor McGonagall. “I had honestly thought,” Professor Quirrell murmured, “that I jammed that mirror without alarm. What were two first-year Slytherins doing alone in the Forbidden Forest? Mr. Malfoy has more sense than this… What a fiasco.”

Harry didn’t answer. The sense of doom was as strong as Harry could ever remember feeling it, a feeling of power in the air so great that it was almost tangible. Some part of him was still viscerally shocked at how fast the shields surrounding the Aurors had been torn apart. He almost hadn’t been able to
see
the successive lashes of color which had torn away the shields like tissue paper. It made the duel Professor Quirrell had fought against the Auror in Azkaban look like a mockery, a child’s game - though Professor Quirrell had claimed, then, that if he’d fought for real the Auror would have been dead in seconds; and Harry knew now that this was also true.

Just how high did the power ladder go?

“I take it,” Harry said, managing to keep his voice steady, “that your eating unicorns has something to do with why you’ll get fired from the Defense Professor position. I don’t suppose you’d care to explain in considerable detail?”

Professor Quirrell looked at him. The almost tangible sense of power in the air seemed to diminish, drawing back into the Defense Professor. “I shall indeed explain myself,” the Defense Professor said. “I need to cast a few Memory Charms first, and then we may go off and discuss it, for it would not be wise for me to stay. You will return to this time later, as I know.”

Harry willed himself to be able to see through the Cloak he had mastered; and knew that another Harry stood beside him, hidden by his own Deathly Hallow. Harry then told his Cloak to hide himself from himself once more, and it did; being able to perceive your future self meant having to match the memory later.

Harry’s own voice said, then, sounding strange in present-Harry’s ears, “He has a surprisingly good explanation.”

Present-Harry remembered the words as best he could. Nothing more was said between them.

Professor Quirrell walked to Draco’s form, and chanted the spell of the False Memory Charm. The Defense Professor stood there for perhaps a minute, seemingly lost to the world.

Harry had been studying Obliviations, these last couple of weeks - though he couldn’t have helped cast the spells, unless he was willing to exhaust himself almost completely, and for some reason they wanted an Auror to lose every single life memory involving the color blue. But Harry had some idea, now, of the concentration which the far more difficult False Memory Charm entailed. You had to try to live the other person’s entire life inside your own head, at least if you wanted to create the False Memories with less than a sixteen-to-one slowdown as you separately crafted sixteen major tracks of memory. It might have been quiet, there might have been no outward sign; but Harry knew something of the difficulties now, and he knew to be impressed.

Professor Quirrell finished, and moved on to Tracey Davis, then the three Aurors, and finally Professor McGonagall. Harry waited, but future-Harry made no protest. It was possible that even Professor McGonagall, if she’d been awake, wouldn’t have protested. It was not yet the Ides of May, and apparently there would be a surprisingly good explanation.

With a gesture, Draco’s stunned body was lifted, and sent a short distance into the woods, before being carefully deposited on the ground. Then a final gesture from Professor Quirrell ripped a huge chunk out of the unicorn’s side, leaving behind ragged edges; the raw meat hovered in the air, then wavered in Vanishment and was gone.

“Done,” Professor Quirrell said. “I must depart this place now, Mr. Potter. Come with me, and remain here.”

Professor Quirrell strode away, and Harry followed and remained behind.

They walked through the woods in silence for a time, before Harry heard faint voices in the distance. The next set of Aurors, presumably, after the first set had fallen out of contact. What his future self was saying, Harry didn’t know.

“They won’t detect us, nor hear our speech,” said Professor Quirrell. The sense of power and doom around the Defense Professor was still strong. The man seated himself on a tree stump, one where the light of the almost-full moon fell full on him. “I should first say that when you speak to the Aurors, in the future, you should tell them that you frightened away the seething dark, the same as you did that Dementor. It is what Mr. Malfoy will remember seeing.” Professor Quirrell gave a small sigh. “It may cause some alarm, if they conclude that some horror kin to Dementors, and strong enough to break the Aurors’ shields, is loose in the Forbidden Forest. But I could not think of what else to do. If the forest is better-guarded after this - but with any luck I have already consumed what I need. Would you mind telling me how you arrived so quickly? How did you know Mr. Malfoy was in trouble?”