Master of Death, Lover Witches

"Harry?"

"Yes?" he asked, looking back along the nearly pitch-black staircase at the outline of Su Li. "Is something wrong?"

"Not wrong, exactly, it's just… When I asked for your help, I thought you would use your reputation, or your connections, or something like that. I didn't really expect to be dragged away in the middle of the night to commit a crime."

Harry stopped two steps off of the staircase's bottom, which leveled out into a straight (and even darker) hallway, ending in a large door.

"Let me put it this way," Harry said. "What do you think is the real crime out of these two? A little bit of innocent, well-meaning breaking and entering into a government office, or coming between a loving family in its most sensitive moment?"

"The breaking and entering?"

Harry sighed. "Fine. Maybe it's against a law, or two. But trust me on this. The Unspeakables are as stubborn as Kneazles. You can't talk them into doing anything they don't want to. We've got a better chance at stealing something they think is theirs than we have of ever convincing them to give it up."

"But we haven't even finished school! How do you expect us to break in?"

"The front door is a good start. Don't worry about anything except getting your grandfather back. I'll handle the rest," he promised.

He planted his hand on her shoulder, making Su straighten. She nodded, and Harry decided to assume that the doubt on her face was just a trick of the low light.

Then he turned around, completed the descent, and reached the door. Standing still for a moment, he chose not to do anything that might be overkill.

The iron door flew with a deafening crash as his blasting curse threw it from its hinges.

"I heard you kids were being naughty!" he announced, grinning. "Don't worry, daddy is here to straighten you out!"

The door finished skidding along the floor. When he got his first look inside the room, even he was forced to stop and do a double take.

He'd been inside this place before. He remembered the room's smooth black tile floors and featureless walls. It was about four times larger than the Gryffindor Common Room, with doors lacking handles all around the sides. But back then it had been lit by eerie blue torches to make up for its lack of windows, leaving the space feeling like a high-budget haunted house.

That wasn't anything like what he saw now. In fact, in contrast to the dark stairwell he and Su arrived from, they seemed to have stepped out into the light of day, despite the time being later than midnight. An artificial sun was visible along the ceiling amidst blue skies, casting its light down onto the floor, with the sole exception of one corner that was stuck in perpetual night, complete with its own moon. Beds, couches, and cushions were spread across the floor, filled by men in varying states of undress. Some of them were accompanied by women, but not all of them. One lay beside something that was a woman from the waist up, and a fish from the waist down. Another seemed to be cuddling a wooden puppet animated by his own magic. The room reeked of Firewhiskey and illicit potions. More than a few wizards were too hazy-eyed to notice their front door being knocked in, while others scrambled to their feet and snagged wands.

Most of the ones who moved were looking at Harry with as much confusion as he was looking at them, but one wizard did make a break for the far wall, where a large switch featured prominently. He reached out, ready to bring it down, before Harry's stunner hit him mid-sprint, making him faceplant against the wall.

"What is the meaning of this?" demanded a man with slicked-back brown hair and sunken eyes.

Harry actually recognized him. Saul Crocker attended the Quidditch World Cup, one of the many ministry employees Arthur Weasley had named as they passed by. Harry hadn't been listening all that closely, but he remembered Crocker's calculating gaze.

"That's actually the question I'm dying to ask," Harry admitted. "I'm no expert when it comes to research, but it looks to me like the only thing you all are researching is how many positions you can bone in. And what does this thing do, I wonder?"

Harry bludgeoned the switch on the wall that an Unspeakable had made a break for. When it was hit, the room plunged into darkness, clearing of furniture and returning to the bluish hue Harry remembered from the past. He hit the switch again, and the room returned to how it had been when they entered.

Everyone seemed disoriented, but many of the women in particular cried out, shrinking against the beds fearfully. Harry went still.

"Are they muggles?" he asked.

"Oh just tell them already."

A stocky man pushed himself up, away from two women lying on either side of him, shooting an irritated look at Croaker.

"Are you sure, Broderick?" Croaker asked.

"What's the harm? It's not like they're going to remember anything. Look at them. They're kids!"

Croaker cast a discerning eye at Harry and Su, before shrugging.

"Welcome to the Department of Mysteries," he announced, spreading his arms. "Nothing done in this office will ever reach the outside world, be it adultery, indulgence, or anything else nice that this world has to offer."

"No!" Su, who had thus far lurked behind Harry, stepped forward, her eyes wild. "I refuse to believe this! The Unspeakables are supposed to be the brightest minds the Wizarding World has to offer!"

"We are," said Croaker. "Every single one of us worked hard to reach this point. We only take wizards of the highest caliber. Every person in this room has earned the right to enjoy himself, even if it's in ways you couldn't get anywhere else. See Wallace over there?"

Croaker pointed to the man Harry had spotted with a wooden puppet, which moved and clung to his body like a cuddling lover. When the puppet sensed his eyes, it raised its featureless head, somehow giving off the impression of a glare.

"He's the leading authority in all of Britain on animation charms. He got so good at them, in fact, that he divorced his wife and designed a better one. But the ministry wouldn't file the new union, so he came down here, where nothing could get in their way. Barrett in the corner is the one who made this lovely ceiling. It gives off real vitamin D, so you can live down here for years without ever going out! He's a real genius, but he could never find anything in life that gave him pleasure, until a vampire bit him one night. Nearly killed him, but that's how he learned that he gets off on having his blood sucked."

Wallace sat in a wooden chair in the one corner of the room that was stuck in perpetual night. His arms hung slackly beside him while his head lolled to the side, eyes open but unseeing. His skin was utterly pale. A gorgeous, buxom blond sat sideways across his lap, her face tight to his neck. When she sensed their eyes and pulled back, thin red trails spanned from her sharp canines to his pallid neck.

"Hold on a second," Harry said. "Rosmerta?"

The blond vampire giggled, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.

"Harry? Is that you?" she asked. "Oh dear. Aren't you a bit young for a place like this?"

Despite the concerned words, her voice sounded rather… hungry.

"Don't worry. I don't plan on staying long," Harry told her.

"Quite right," said Croaker. "Now, not all of us have such eye-catching tastes, but we were equally busy, so I'd like to keep this disruption to a minimum."

Harry eyed the undressed women spread around the room. It was clear what they were here for. But something was still off-putting to him, which just refused to add up.

Croaker caught him looking. "Hookers," he said with an impressive amount of relish. "Isn't it an incredible idea those Muggles had, to trade sex for money? It's so inspired that it could've come from one of us Unspeakables! We can just send someone out to snap them up, enjoy their services, and then erase the entire evening from their memories. Oh, but we're not monsters! We always pay them. Ministry budget has to go somewhere."

The man sounded proud of the scheme. Harry looked at the women, some of whom looked back at him. He didn't like the shine in their eyes. It reminded him of Mr. Roberts, the disoriented Muggle at the Quidditch World Cup, getting blasted by memory charms every few minutes. He wondered how many times these women had gone through this before.

"How long?"

Su's voice was dangerously quiet. She was standing very straight, with her limbs stiff. When she looked up, her eyes were wide.

"How long has this been all that the Unspeakables are?" she demanded.

"I'm not sure I appreciate the implication there little lady," said Croaker. "But this is what the department has always been, at least as long as I've been here. So… decades? Perhaps a century? Certainly longer than any of us have been alive."

The wail that Su let out made Harry flinch. She put her head down and ran, disappearing through the closest of many doors spaced around the circular room. Croaker shook his head.

"Damn it," he muttered. "I knew we should've Obliviated you sooner. Now we'll have to go and track her down, and who knows how long that will take."

As he spoke, he pointed his wand at Harry, as did many of the men around the room.

"Well, I think we've been very helpful," Croaker said, "so I hope you return the favor and hold still while we put department security first. This will only take a moment."

Harry pulled his eyes away from the door that Su had run through.

"You really like memory charms, don't you?"

"Oh, they're the best!" Croaker said. "They'll fix up any problem in an instant!"

Harry smiled. "Honestly, that's a load off my shoulders. I'm not the greatest with them, see, and if you all weren't such wonderful fans, I might've felt a little bad about this."

O-O-O

When Harry caught up with Su, she was crying beside a fountain. He patted her back, but also eased her away from the pearly liquid burbling nearby. It was too shiny to be water, because it wasn't: Amortentia, the most potent love potion known to wizardkind.

Su was crying. Harry didn't blame her. She had told him about her problem, from her grandfather's job to her dream to follow in his footsteps. She'd lived for over a decade striving to become an Unspeakable, only for the reality of them to be shoved in his face.

In hindsight, Harry probably wouldn't have done things this way if he'd known what the Unspeakables really were, but apparently there were things even two lives hadn't been enough to teach him. Exposing a government-funded sex party hadn't been on his to-do list for the night.

Abruptly, Su stood up. She was still crying, but her mouth split in a snarl.

"How could he?" she yelled, snatching her wand from her pocket. "I idolized him! Everything I did was to be like him! And you're telling me he— with those assholes—"

She jerked her wand without casting a proper spell, but the emotions roaring through her called on her magic. The stones in the fountain cracked. Pearly liquid splattered across the room. Harry yelped, just barely casting a shield fast enough to prevent both of them from becoming drenched.

"Careful, Su," he warned, watching the liquid drip down his shield in a beautiful array of glistening color. "Amortentia is serious stuff. Even a bit on your skin could have you obsessing over the next person you see."

She hardly seemed to hear him, turning away and beginning to cast spells at the rest of the room, cutting bureaus of potions and blasting shelves to splinters.

"What did any of it mean?" she wailed. "The celebrations, and the late nights, and every story he told me about the Nian and fending it off… How could all of it be lies? How can it feel like I just lost him for a second time?"

She turned back to the main fountain, a blasting curse on her lips, before Harry grabbed her hand.

"You're wrong about that," he said. "They're real."

Su was so surprised, her rant stopped dead.

"What's real?" she asked, her voice hoarse.

"Nians, and all the rest of those myths. Those at least are true. I've seen them. Want me to prove it?"

She stared at him as if trying to tell whether he was joking Slowly, Su nodded. Harry smiled.

"Then hold on tight."

O-O-O

Su had only sidelong Apparated five times in her life. Every time, she swore the sensation was so awful that she would never put up with it again. But it had never been quite as bad as when Harry wrapped his arm around her and they left the Level 9 of the ministry with a huge crack. 

He'd Apparated them into the ministry earlier that night. Su had thought that was impossible, both leaving Hogwarts' grounds and appearing directly inside the ministry, but he was the Boy Who Lived, so she assumed he had some kind of special clearance. That trip had felt like normal, uncomfortable Apparition.

What he just did was not the same as that. One second they had been standing together, the next she felt as if she had been crushed down to a miniscule size, her whole body compressing while speeding up to untenable speeds. She had been sure she was going to die, and she almost wished for it, the feeling was so awful. Then she was in China.

She had never been to the homeland that her grandfather left behind, but she'd heard stories and seen enough Pensieve memories to recognize its mountains, with the tall sheer rocks wrapped in green cloaks of foliage. The air was humid. Su collapsed to her knees on arrival. One look down was enough to prevent her from even trying to refind her feet. 

Harry held his arms out to the sides, laughing as he balanced on the edge of the rock that they were standing on, the whole thing no wider than a car. He leaned over to one side, staring down a canyon hundreds of feet deep. 

"Yep," he said. "This is definitely the right place."

Su focused on the feeling of the stone beneath her palms and knees, carefully avoiding looking at the drop-off. "Where are we?"

"Where the Nian lives," Harry said. "You wanted to see one, didn't you?"

"I…"

He peered at her. "You do want to, right? If not, we can go back, straight to Hogwarts. I could even take back what your grandfather was missing on my own. The Unspeakables wouldn't remember a thing."

That sounded nice. Su could go to sleep, wrap herself deep in bed, and maybe even skip classes tomorrow and keep her face buried in pillows. She wouldn't have to worry about anything. It would make her life so easy.

But she didn't need easy. She needed something — anything — to replace the hole that had formed inside her chest in the Department of Mysteries.

She stood up, even though her knees shook.

"Show me," she said.

Harry grinned and jumped off the rock. 

Su gasped as he plummeted down, his robes flapping. She leaned closer to the edge than she felt comfortable with, staring after him, but could only see darkness in the canyon below. It was very early morning, and the rising sun could only illuminate so much.

Su was alone, except for the brisk breeze scouring her back.

"Harry?" she said.

There was nothing. The breeze snatched her voice as soon as it left her lips, carrying it far away.

"HARRY?" Su yelled. "HARRY?"

She thought she heard the name echo, but the sound wasn't qutie right. It was too deep. It grew louder, and louder…

A shape blasted past her into the sky, making Su shriek and shield her face. When she lowered her arms, craning her neck to look up, Su couldn't help but gape. 

There was a beast in the sky, framed against the shining moon. The sound she heard was coming from its throat, as loud as a whole pack of giants screaming in unison. It possessed the muscular body of a bull, only many times larger than any Su had ever seen. It reared back, clawing the air with enormous taloned paws. Its tail was one giant muscle, whipping about at impossible speeds. In spite of all of this, it was the head that Su couldn't make herself look away from. Enormous canines. A long and flowing main. Intelligent, yet wild eyes. Su could easily imagine entire villages being snapped up by its jaws one household at a time, chewed and swallowed by this force of nature.

"WOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"

Jolting, Su managed to pick out one more feature she missed at first. Perched on its back, fastened out of the beast's reach by an impossibly overpowered sticking charm, was Harry Potter, whooping with joy as if he'd taken his Firebolt out for a joyride. 

Su watched the Nian buck and claw at its own back. When nothing it did could reach the pest, it dive bombed, attempting to dislodge him that way, but as it passed the mountains they came alive, trees transfiguring into long and sturdy chains, wrapping it around its throat. The Nian roared and strained, but it was fighting to move an entire mountain. The chains stretched taut. More wrapped around the beast, leashing it in place with wooden binds, all of which regenerated as fast as they tore. In the end, the beast was immobilized, and came to a final growling stop directly beside Su.

From its back, Harry leaned down, extending a hand to her.

"Miss?" he greeted, as if it were a simple horse-drawn carriage he was inviting her onto. 

Su swallowed. Then she took the hand, allowing him to pull her up, onto the back of the beast that once terrorized her childhood mind.

Harry covertly fastened her butt in place with a sticking charm, before the chains slithered off, freeing the Nian once more. Su wrapped her hands around his waist as it took off into the night, carrying two passengers in tow.