Chapter 51:
– Peter –
The sewers beneath Shanghai smelled exactly the way Peter Pettigrew imagined hell would smell, if hell were somehow less dignified than the afterlife he probably deserved.
The transformation rippled through Peter Pettigrew's body in the familiar, nauseating cascade of bone and sinew reshaping itself, and within seconds the wet brown rat that had been scurrying along a narrow stone ledge above the waterline swelled and stretched and reformed into the hunched, doughy shape of a man who very much did not want to be where he was.
"Bloody fucking hell," Peter wheezed, bracing one hand against the slimy tunnel wall as the last of the Animagus shift settled into his joints with a series of unpleasant little pops.
He stood calf deep in slow moving water that was black as ink and smelled like something had died in it repeatedly over the course of several centuries, which, given that these tunnels predated the modern city of Shanghai by at least four hundred years, was probably not far from the truth.
Peter drew his wand and cast a cleaning charm on himself, or tried to. The wand, a knotted eleven inch piece of larch with a unicorn hair core that he had stolen from an unconscious witch in a Mongolian tavern three weeks ago, sputtered and resisted, producing a halfhearted pulse of magic that removed about a third of the filth from his robes and left the rest in damp, reeking streaks across his chest and sleeves. He cast it again and managed to get his face and hands mostly clean, though his hair remained a lost cause, plastered flat against his scalp in greasy ropes that dripped something he refused to examine too closely.
I was a Marauder once.
The thought arrived unbidden, as it often did in moments like these, moments where the sheer degradation of his current existence pressed in from all sides like the walls of a coffin.
He had sat at the same table as James Potter, Sirius Black, and Remus Lupin. He had helped create the Marauder's Map, one of the most brilliant pieces of enchantment work Hogwarts had ever seen. Professors had praised his spellwork in class. Girls had known his name—even if he very rarely scored actual dates with them—at least they knew him! He had been someone, perhaps not the brightest or the bravest or the most handsome of their little group, but someone, a person who existed in the world as more than a frightened animal crawling through foreign sewers on the orders of a master who would kill him as casually as swatting a fly.
And now look at me. Knee deep in Chinese shit water, holding a stolen wand that barely works, ten thousand miles from anything resembling home, and not a single soul on the entire planet who would notice or care if I drowned down here.
Peter shook the self pity off with a practiced, almost mechanical efficiency that came from decades of experience.
Self pity was a luxury reserved for people who had options, and Peter Pettigrew had not had options in a very long time. What he had was a mission, a master who would Crucio him into a drooling wreck if he failed, and the rapidly deteriorating survival calculus of a man who had spent his entire adult life betting on the winning side and discovering, with increasing horror, that he might have finally backed the wrong horse.
He sloshed forward through the tunnel with his wand raised and the feeble Lumos at its tip casting a bubble of yellow light that seemed almost spiteful with how little it could actually illuminate in the darkness. He never believed that bullshit about wands being sentient, but this one clearly did not like him.
The tunnels branched and intersected in a maze that would have been impossible to navigate without the Point Me spell, which itself had been growing more erratic the deeper he went.
Peter paused at a junction where three tunnels converged and allowed himself the dangerous luxury of honest reflection, something he tried to avoid because honest reflection had a nasty habit of leading to panic attacks, and a panic attack in a sewer beneath a foreign city with no allies within several thousand miles was not a survivable event.
Things are bad, Peter. Be honest with yourself. Things are very, very bad.And Ron went back to St. Mungo's for follow up treatment during the break, and the Weasleys discovered he had been under the influence of my potions for a second time! Alongside those other two Gryffindor slaves I had acquired. And now I have nothing. My servants/slaves are all gone!
But he wasn't the only one with problems this past month. He supposed that the state of the Death Eaters was the more pressing concern anyway, because it affected Peter's immediate survival. When the Sitri family had seized Gringotts Bank and rebranded it overnight, the effect on Voldemort's support base had been roughly equivalent to detonating a bomb beneath the foundations of a building that was already riddled with cracks.
Every Death Eater fortune, every secret vault, every hidden ledger and off the books account that the goblins had maintained for dark families for generations, all of it exposed, all of it transparent.
Peter had to admit, with the grudging respect of one survivor for another, that Selene Sitri was terrifyingly competent. The goblins had been corrupt, greedy, and manipulable, which was exactly what dark wizards needed from their bankers. Selene Sitri was none of those things. She systematically reported every suspicious transaction in every dark family's history to the Department of Magical Law Enforcement with a cheerful cover letter and a complete paper trail.
The results had been catastrophic. Lucius Malfoy, once the wealthiest and most politically connected man in Magical Britain, had lost access to the vast majority of the Malfoy fortune overnight. The Lestrange vault was frozen. The Nott, Crabbe, Goyle, Avery, and Rookwood family accounts were all flagged within days. Twenty years of carefully cultivated financial infrastructure, the bribe networks, the shell companies, the trust funds laundered through charitable foundations, all of it burned to ash by a woman who looked thirty five and was apparently old enough to have watched human civilizations rise and fall as a mildly interesting hobby.
And without money, the Death Eaters had lost their most effective weapon. Not dark magic, not violence, not the fear of Voldemort's name, but gold.
Gold was what had kept them free after the first war. Without gold, there was only Madam Bones, and Madam Bones was a nightmare.
The inner circle that Voldemort had freed from Azkaban during the chaos of the Fallen Angel attack were now the most wanted fugitives in Britain, and without gold to grease palms or safe houses to hide in, they were being picked off steadily, systematically, and with a ruthless efficiency that suggested Madam Bones had been keeping very detailed lists during all those years when her hands were tied.
And Voldemort's reaction to all of this had been exactly what Peter expected, which was to say, violent, erratic, and increasingly terrifying to be near.
Peter recalled the scene at their current hideout, a crumbling chateau in rural France that Voldemort had commandeered by murdering its elderly muggle owner and vanishing the body:
The Dark Lord had been pacing the rotting drawing room, his resurrected body still not quite right, the movements too fluid, the proportions subtly wrong, the skin waxy and pale and stretched too tight over the bones of his face. Three Death Eaters, Peter could not even remember which ones because they were low ranking enough to be interchangeable, had made the mistake of suggesting within Voldemort's hearing that perhaps not joining the Fallen Angel attack at Hogwarts had been a strategic error, that they had missed an opportunity to kill Harry Sitri while the school's defenses were overwhelmed.
Voldemort had Cruciated all three of them for so long that they would never recover.
But they weren't wrong, were they? And the Dark Lord knows they weren't wrong, and that's exactly why he punished them so badly, because he's afraid, and Lord Voldemort does not tolerate reminders that he can feel fear.
Peter was not a brave man. Peter had never been a brave man. But Peter was a survivor, and survivors knew how to read the odds, and the odds said that Lord Voldemort was no longer the most dangerous player on the board, had not been for some time, and was sinking further down the rankings with every passing week while his enemies grew stronger and his resources dwindled and his mind grew more fractured and paranoid.
I should run. I should just run. Turn into a rat, find a ship headed to South America, hide in the cargo hold, live in a barn somewhere warm and quiet until everyone who wants me dead has either forgotten about me or died themselves. I did it for twelve years. I could do it again.
The fantasy was warm and sweet and Peter let himself live in it for a few precious seconds before reality dragged him back by the scruff of his neck.
He couldn't run from Voldemort.
The Dark Mark burned whenever the Dark Lord called, a searing brand of magical chain and ownership seared into the skin of his left forearm, and no amount of distance had ever dulled that pain. Peter had tested it once, during his twelve years as Scabbers, when the Mark had gone dormant after Voldemort's first fall. Even then, even with the Dark Lord reduced to a bodiless wraith drifting through Albanian forests, Peter had sometimes woken in the night with his arm aching, the skull and serpent tattoo prickling with residual malice as if reminding him that the leash was still there, just slack for now, and could be yanked taut again at any moment.
And then there was Sirius.
Peter could feel him, and had been able to feel him since arriving in Shanghai. Sirius was somewhere in this city, close, closer than Peter was comfortable with, and getting closer with the single minded obsession of a man who had spent eighteen years in the worst prison on Earth because of Peter's betrayal and who had nothing left in his life except the burning need to make Peter pay for it.
Running from Voldemort might be survivable. Running from Sirius Black might be survivable. Running from both of them simultaneously, while also being hunted by the British Ministry, Dumbledore's Order, Madam Bones's Aurors, and an entire clan of immortal devils whose teenage prince Peter had tried to murder multiple times?
Every direction I run, someone is already there waiting for me…
Peter forced the spiral to stop. Panic was a luxury, same as self pity, and he could afford neither.
He had a mission.
The Jiangshi, the Chinese hopping vampires, undead creatures animated by dark qi rather than the blood magic of their European cousins, territorial and isolationist and deeply distrustful of outsiders. Voldemort wanted an alliance with them, or at minimum a trade agreement for rare ritual components, forbidden alchemical ingredients and cursed artifacts that the Jiangshi court supposedly controlled through a significant portion of the East Asian black market.
Peter knew almost nothing about Jiangshi beyond what Voldemort had told him in a five minute briefing that had been less a briefing and more a set of curt orders punctuated by the implicit threat that failure would be punished with something worse than the Cruciatus. They were old. They were powerful within their territory. They despised Western wizards almost as much as they despised the Chinese magical government. And their underground court was accessible through the old smuggler's tunnels beneath Shanghai's docks, which meant, because the universe apparently had a personal vendetta against Peter Pettigrew's dignity, that the entrance to a potential alliance with an ancient and powerful supernatural faction was located in a fucking sewer.
Why couldn't it have been a tea house? An opium den? A perfectly normal basement with a perfectly normal door and a perfectly normal staircase? Why does every dark creature on the planet insist on conducting business in the most revolting location imaginable?
Peter pressed on, the tunnel widening gradually until the walls pulled back and the ceiling rose and he found himself standing at the edge of a larger chamber where multiple tunnel systems converged.
Faded Chinese characters had been carved into the stone walls at each tunnel entrance, deep and deliberate, and Peter's translation charm rendered them in his mind as variations on a single theme: turn back, go no further, the dead do not welcome the living.
Cheerful. Very welcoming. I'm sure this will go splendidly.
Peter straightened his filthy robes, squared his shoulders in a posture that was meant to project authority but actually projected the desperate bravado of a man trying to convince himself he wasn't terrified, and raised his voice to a volume that echoed off the chamber walls and bounced between the tunnel mouths in overlapping, ghostly repetitions of itself.
"Hello there," he said in English, and hated how small and reedy his voice sounded in this space, how it withered and shrank against the oppressive silence. "I serve the Dark Lord Voldemort, the rightful ruler of Magical Britain, and I have come to parlay with the honoured Jiangshi Court."
He added the word "honoured" at the last second, a small, desperate gamble on flattery that he immediately regretted because it made him sound like a door to door salesman trying to sell enchanted vacuum cleaners.
Silence.
The chamber swallowed his words and gave nothing back. The black water didn't ripple. The fungus didn't flicker. The darkness at the edges of his Lumos held perfectly, insultingly still.
Then Peter heard snickering.
It came from everywhere and nowhere, a high pitched, chittering sound that ricocheted off the stone walls in ways that defied acoustic logic, seeming to originate from behind him and above him and below him all at once. The laughter had a strange cadence to it, syllables and inflections that did not belong to any language Peter recognized, something tonal and ancient and deeply amused, interspersed with sounds that made his blood run cold because they were unmistakably mimicry, his own words being repeated back to him in a mocking, singsong falsetto.
"Daaaaark Loooord," the voices sang, stretching the syllables into something absurd and grotesque. "Riiiiightful ruuuuuler."
More snickering, from at least four or five distinct sources, maybe more, the echoes making it impossible to count.
Peter's wand hand was trembling badly enough that his Lumos flickered like a candle in a draft, the light pulsing in and out and making the shadows at the chamber's edges surge and retreat in a rhythm that felt almost like breathing. He turned in a slow, clumsy circle, splashing through the knee deep water, trying to locate the source of the voices, but the acoustics were hopeless and his stolen wand's detection charms were useless against whatever ancient magic permeated these walls.
"I come in peace," Peter tried, and the quaver in his voice was audible now, naked and pathetic and impossible to hide. "My master offers an alliance of mutual benefit, trade and resources and shared enemies who would see both our peoples brought low, and he asks only for an audience with your leaders to discuss the terms of—"
The water around his legs went from cool to freezing in the span of a single heartbeat, so abruptly that Peter gasped and nearly lost his footing, his muscles seizing as the cold bit into him like teeth. His Lumos guttered and died completely for one terrible, endless second of absolute darkness.
Something dropped from the ceiling.
It landed on his shoulders with the weight of a large dog and the speed of a striking snake, driving him face first into the black water with enough force to send a plume of filthy spray in every direction. Peter's stolen wand was ripped from his grip by fingers that felt like iron bands wrapped in parchment skin, and his forehead cracked against the ancient stone beneath the water's surface with a sound that he felt more than heard, a deep, resonant thud that filled his skull with white light and sent his thoughts scattering like startled rats.
His mouth filled with foul water. His arms flailed uselessly against something crouched on his back, something that was holding him down with casual, contemptuous strength while the snickering intensified from all directions, louder now and closer, accompanied by a new sound that Peter's dimming consciousness registered with a final, absurd flicker of recognition.
Peter Pettigrew, servant of the Dark Lord, former Marauder, and the most pathetic man in the wizarding world, sank beneath the black water and let the darkness take him.
– Harry –
We roamed through the backstreets of Shanghai's magical district. Further away from people. In fact, it seemed like we hadn't seen a single person in at least 10 minutes. Like they all knew to stay away from here. These streets were clearly dangerous.
Sirius Black moved through them like he'd been born here, which he obviously hadn't, but eighteen years in Azkaban followed by months as a fugitive had apparently given the man an instinct for navigating the underbelly of any city he wandered into.
Lilja walked on my left with her hand resting in the crook of my elbow, her fingers light and casual in a way that would have looked relaxed to anyone who didn't know her. I knew her.
She looked like a woman on a date with her lover.
She was functioning as a Queen protecting her King.
I loved that about her.
We passed through the last recognizable stretch of Shanghai's magical quarter, where late night apothecaries still had their doors open and elderly witches sold steaming bowls of something from carts that smelled incredible, and then the ambient energy shifted. I felt it roll over my skin like stepping from a heated room into a walk-in freezer, not a temperature change but a pressure change, the wards and enchantments that kept the magical district vibrant and populated simply stopping at an invisible line in the street, replaced by something older and less welcoming. The lanterns on the buildings beyond that line were dark. The windows were boarded or bricked. The few people we had been sharing the street with had vanished without my noticing, which was a neat trick considering that I could normally track a housefly at fifty meters with my devil senses.
Nobody wanted to be here. The magic itself was telling us to leave.
Sirius didn't slow down. Neither did we.
Three blocks deeper into the dead zone, the street ended in a wall of crumbling grey brick that looked like it had been old when the Qing Dynasty was young.
"Here," Sirius said. He pointed at the base of the wall where a crack ran through the brickwork at ground level, a narrow gap barely wide enough to fit my fist through, choked with grime and ancient mortar dust.
"Watched the rat squeeze through in his Animagus form about three hours ago," Sirius continued, crouching beside the crack with his wand drawn, his voice carrying the flat, clipped cadence of a man delivering a tactical report. "Waited for him to come back out. He hasn't. I tried blasting the wall, but whatever's warding this place bounced my Reducto back at me and almost took my head off if I didn't duck." He gestured at a spot two meters behind us where the street surface was indeed shattered in a rough starburst pattern, stone fragments still scattered around the impact point.
Lilja stepped forward. "Oh, for Odin's sake. Men always try to blast shit open when they see a locked door..." she muttered, and the annoyance in her voice was so thoroughly unimpressed that it circled all the way around past irritation and arrived somewhere in the neighbourhood of withering pity.
She raised her right hand. A pulse of energy rolled off her palm and struck the wall.
Sirius stared at her with his mouth slightly open.
"Lily Potter was always a bloody genius with charms," he said, and the words came out sounding less like a compliment and more like a reflex, something dragged up from twenty years of buried memory before his conscious mind could stop it.
Lilja's hand dropped to her side and her head turned toward Sirius with a speed that made him flinch.
"Don't," she said, and the single syllable landed in the dark street like a stone dropped onto glass, "call me by his last name."
Sirius's jaw worked silently for a moment, and then something that might have been shame flickered across his gaunt face before he looked away.
A section of the street three feet to my left began to glow, revealing the shape of a hidden large square trapdoor set flush into the ground.
Lilja looked at the trapdoor, then at the tiny crack Sirius had been staking out for three hours, and then at Sirius himself with an expression of such magnificent smugness that I almost laughed despite the circumstances.
"Did you forget all of your spellwork over the years, or just the useful parts?" she asked.
Sirius's eye twitched. "Azkaban will do that to you, yeah," he said, and his voice had gone very quiet. "Eighteen years with Dementors feeding on every happy memory you've got, sucking them dry one by one until there's nothing left but the ones soaked in so much guilt and grief that even those parasites don't want them. You don't come out of that with your full repertoire intact. You come out with the spells that kept you sane and the spells that kept you alive, and everything in between gets eaten." He paused. "Combat magic stayed. Everything else went."
The smugness drained out of Lilja's expression so fast it might as well have been siphoned. "Oh," she said. "Right. I forgot."
An awkward silence settled over the three of us.
Eighteen years in a cell for a crime he didn't commit, and Pettigrew, the actual traitor, spent those same eighteen years sleeping in a warm bed as a family's pet rat. That's enough to break anyone. It doesn't excuse him taking it out on me, but I'd be lying if I said I couldn't understand the rage.
Lilja crouched beside the trapdoor and pressed her palm flat against the glowing red ward-lines. After a few seconds she stood and brushed her hands clean.
"Standard containment wards, very old, partially degraded. Designed to keep things in, not keep things out." She glanced at me. "Whatever's down there, the people who built this entrance were more worried about it escaping than about anyone breaking in."
"That's comforting," I said.
"Isn't it just," she agreed.
I reached down and gripped the edge of the trapdoor with both hands. The stone was heavier than it looked, dense and magically reinforced, but my devil strength handled it well enough. I heaved it open and swung it to the side, where it hit the cobblestones with a deep, resonant thoom that echoed down the street and made Sirius reach instinctively for his wand.
Below the trapdoor was a vertical shaft carved from dark stone, dropping straight down into blackness.
"Ladies first?" Sirius offered with a humourless smile.
"Men first," Lilja corrected, and looked at me with an expression that said I'll be right behind you and if anything touches you before I can reach it I will take it apart.
I stepped off the edge and only heard Sirius shout something like "wait" before I vanished from his sight.
My devil wings caught the air halfway down, and I landed at the bottom of the shaft on stone that was slick with moisture and coated in some kind of bioluminescent fungal growth that cast everything in a faint, sickly blue-green glow. The tunnel stretched in both directions, carved from solid rock rather than built from brick, with Chinese characters etched deep into the walls at regular intervals.
My inherited devil language abilities let me parse them automatically.
Turn back. Go no further. The dead do not welcome the living.
Lilja landed beside me without a sound,, and less than a second later the bright green of her eyes swept the tunnel in both directions with the calm, methodical assessment of someone who had been trained to fight in enclosed spaces.
Sirius climbed down the old-fashioned way, hand over hand on the ancient holds, grunting with effort and muttering profanity under his breath that would have made a sailor proud. When he reached the bottom and saw the tunnel, his face did something complicated. "Well," he said. "This is shit."
"Literally," I agreed, glancing down at the black water that covered the floor to a depth of roughly six inches. "Try not to swallow any of it."
We had taken perhaps twenty steps into the left-hand tunnel when Lilja stopped moving. "Draugr," she said with a scowl, and her voice had dropped in a way that usually preceded extreme violence. "I smell draugr. The undead." She paused, nostrils flaring, and then corrected herself.
Her civilian clothes vanished.
The transition was instantaneous, a flash of golden light that devoured her cream blouse and charcoal skirt and replaced them with form-fitting silver Valkyrie armour that covered her from chest to ankle in articulated plates of divine Nordic metalwork. Her rapier materialized in her right hand.
She looked like war given a woman's shape.
I will never, ever get tired of watching that. I think I inherited my mother's love for sexy transformation sequences…
Sirius Black, who had been standing three feet behind her and therefore had a front-row seat to the transformation, made a sound that I could only describe as all of his thoughts attempting to exit through his mouth simultaneously and getting jammed in the doorway. "What the fuck was that?!" he managed.
Lilja didn't look at him. Her eyes were fixed on the darkness ahead, her rapier held in a low guard position, her weight shifting onto the balls of her feet in the ready stance of someone expecting imminent contact.
I pulled moisture from the air and the walls and the stagnant water at our feet, drawing it together between my palms and compressing it until it hardened into a blade of pressurized water dense enough to cut steel.
My devil instincts were confirming what Lilja's Valkyrie blood had already told her—something dead was close—and there was a lot of it.
"Stay behind us," I told Sirius without looking back.
"Like hell I will!"
"Then stay between us and try not to get killed by whatever's down here. Lilja, you have point."
"Already do," she said, because she had started moving forward the moment I began forming my blade, her armoured boots absolutely silent on the wet stone in a way that should have been physically impossible given that she was wearing twenty kilos of enchanted Nordic plate.
Sirius fell in beside me, wand raised, and I could feel the tension radiating off him.
We advanced through the tunnel in tight formation.
"DUCK!" Lilja's scream shattered the silence, and her rapier was already moving as the word left her mouth, sweeping in a horizontal arc that whistled through the air directly at the level of Sirius's skull.
"YOU'RE BLOODY INSANE!" Sirius screamed back, and dropped flat onto the wet stone with reflexes that eighteen years of wrongful imprisonment had not managed to dull, his body hitting the floor in a combat roll that sent black water spraying in every direction.
The thing that had been leaping at his unprotected back passed through the space where his head had been a quarter-second earlier and met Lilja's rapier edge-on.
It came apart.
The creature, and I used the word loosely because it had once been a person but was now something else entirely, split from shoulder to hip in a spray of desiccated tissue and black dust, its two halves tumbling past each other in the tunnel's dim light and hitting the walls on opposite sides with a pair of wet, heavy impacts that left dark smears on the ancient stone.
I got my first real look at a Jiangshi in the moment before the bisected corpse stopped twitching.
It was roughly human-shaped and wearing the remains of burial robes that might have been ceremonial two or three centuries ago but were now little more than rotting strips of silk hanging from a body that had been dead for a very long time. Its skin was the colour and texture of old parchment stretched too tight over visible bone structure, and its fingers were tipped with yellowed nails that had grown several inches past the fingertips and curved into hooked claws. The face was the worst part, frozen in a rigor mortis grin that exposed teeth gone black with age, the eyes filmed over with milky cataracts that somehow still seemed to be staring.
Sirius lay on his back in six inches of filthy water, breathing hard, and stared up at the two halves of the thing that had been about to rip his throat out from behind.
Then he looked at Lilja, who was standing over him with her rapier still extended from the killing stroke, her armour splashed with black dust and a single drop of something dark on her cheek.
For a moment I thought he was going to say something cruel, or defensive, or bitter, because that seemed to be his default setting when it came to anything connected to me or the people I cared about.
Instead he said, very quietly, "Thank you."
Lilja offered him her free hand and pulled him to his feet.
"Don't thank me yet," she said, and tilted her head toward the tunnel ahead, where the blue-green fungal glow was being broken by shapes, dozens of shapes, emerging from the darkness with the stiff, jerky, hopping gait that I would come to associate with the Jiangshi for the rest of my very long life.
They came from everywhere at once.
Side tunnels vomited them in clusters of three and four, ceiling alcoves I hadn't noticed disgorged them in drops that landed on the wet stone with heavy, meaty thuds, and the main tunnel ahead darkened as a packed mass of undead bodies hopped toward us in that unnatural, rigid-limbed rhythm, arms outstretched, clawed fingers grasping at the air, every frozen face wearing the same black-toothed rictus grin.
"Oh good," I said. "There's loads of them."
"Twelve from the front," Lilja counted, her rapier shifting to a high guard. "Eight from the left passage. Four on the ceiling. More behind."
"I've got the front with you. Sirius, watch our six." I whipped my water blade in a tight arc to clear the condensation from its edge and felt my Sitri magic circle flare bright beneath my feet. "Try to keep up."
Sirius barked a laugh that was more wild than amused, his stolen wand levelled at the darkness behind us where scraping sounds and chittering had begun to echo. "Boy, I was duelling Death Eaters before you were born!"
The first wave hit us like a tide of grasping dead hands and snapping teeth, and the tunnel erupted into violence.
I swung my water blade into the lead Jiangshi and watched it bite deep into the thing's shoulder and through its rotten skin and bone—the pressurized edge shearing through desiccated flesh and ancient bone with significantly less resistance than I was used to from living opponents, and the creature rocked sideways from the impact and hit the tunnel wall hard enough to crack the stone.
Two more Jiangshi closed from my left, and I threw up a wall of pressurized water that caught them both mid-leap and held them suspended in the current, their limbs thrashing uselessly against the hydraulic force. But they didn't drown, because of course they didn't, they were already dead, and the moment I dropped the wall to deal with the one still clawing at me from the front they would be right back on their feet.
Twenty meters ahead, Lilja was painting a masterpiece in destruction.
I shifted gears. Water was cutting and injuring them, but it wasn't putting them down fast enough.
The Veela fire answered my call the way it always did, rising from somewhere deep in my chest, the place where the bloodline power I'd copied through intimacy with Fleur and Gabrielle and Apolline lived and burned and waited to be needed. Pink-gold flames erupted across my left hand and forearm, dancing over my skin without burning me, and I drove my fist into the chest of the Jiangshi that was still trying to claw through my aura and let the fire go.
The creature's ancient body ignited from the inside out, the Veela flames chasing the dark qi through its desiccated tissues the way fire chases a trail of lamp oil, and within two seconds the thing that had been a hopping undead nightmare was a shrieking, flailing pillar of pink flame that collapsed in on itself and crumbled to ash before it hit the ground.
There we go.
I turned the Veela fire loose.
I swept my burning hand in a wide wave and sent a crescent of pink-gold flame racing down the tunnel at chest height, and the packed mass of Jiangshi that had been advancing toward us walked directly into it because the dead did not possess the survival instinct to stop. The fire hit them like a scythe through wheat and they burned beautifully, ancient burial robes catching first and then the parchment skin and then the bone beneath, each one collapsing into a heap of glowing embers and black ash that hissed when it touched the standing water.
Behind us, Sirius Black was fighting with the specific intensity of a man who had been wanting to hurt something for a very, very long time.
"Reducto!" A Jiangshi that had dropped from the ceiling exploded from the waist down, its upper half spinning through the air and landing in the water with a splash. "Confringo!" The Blasting Curse caught two more in a single detonation that blew a crater in the tunnel floor and sent chunks of undead flying. The dismembered torso from his first kill was still crawling toward him on its clawed hands, and Sirius dealt with it by shifting into Padfoot in one fluid motion, the enormous black dog lunging forward and clamping its jaws around the thing's neck with a crunch of dry bone before whipping his head sideways and hurling the twitching remains into the wall. He shifted back mid-turn, human form flowing out of canine shape like water from a mould, his wand already up and tracking the next target. "Diffindo!" A severing charm sliced the legs out from under a Jiangshi that had been hopping at him from a side tunnel. "Bombarda!" The legless body, still reaching for him as it dragged itself forward on its claws, detonated in a shower of desiccated tissue and bone fragments.
Fuck me, he's good when he's not being a prick. One of the better human mages I've seen.
The last Jiangshi fell with a wet crunch as Lilja drove her rapier through its skull and pinned it to the tunnel wall, the rune-light along her blade flaring bright blue-white as the divine enchantment burned through the dark qi and reduced the creature to a hanging shell of empty skin and clothes impaled on Nordic steel.
Silence returned to the tunnel, broken only by the drip of water, the fading hiss of Veela fire consuming the last ash remains of the undead, and the sound of three people breathing hard.
Sirius leaned against the tunnel wall and wiped something dark from his face with the back of his hand, his chest heaving.
"What kind of fire was that?" he asked between breaths, nodding at my left hand where the last of the Veela flames were dying down to faint pink embers on my fingertips.
"Long story."
He looked at Lilja, who was pulling her rapier free from the skull she'd pinned to the wall with a practised twist that dislodged it cleanly.
"And the armour? The sword? The glowing runes? That's a long story too, I expect?"
"Everything about us is a long story," I said.
Sirius made a sound that was probably supposed to be a laugh but came out closer to an exhausted grunt. "Yeah," he said. "I'm starting to figure that out."
We pressed deeper.
The Jiangshi attack had been a perimeter defence, not a coordinated assault, and once we'd cut through it the tunnels went quiet in a way that was somehow worse than the violence had been.
The silence felt inhabited, like something was watching us move through its territory and had decided, for reasons of its own, to let us proceed.
I took point now, tracking Pettigrew's magical signature with my devil senses. It was faint but detectable, a greasy, wretched little thread of magical energy that tasted, for lack of a better word, exactly the way I imagined a traitor's soul would taste, sour and thin and desperately afraid.
We passed through chambers that had clearly served as living spaces or storerooms, furnished with ancient wooden tables and shelving units that were now empty.
Sirius had fallen into step beside Lilja about fifty meters back, and I had noticed without commenting that the hostility in his body language had diminished from active aggression to something more like wary coexistence. Nearly getting your head taken off by a leaping corpse and having your life saved by the woman you'd been treating like a stranger apparently had a way of recalibrating a man's priorities.
"How are you alive, Lily?"
He said it quietly, without looking at her, his eyes still scanning the tunnel ahead.
"Don't call me that."
"Lilja, then. How?"
She was silent for a long moment, long enough that I thought she might not answer. Then she spoke in a voice stripped down to its barest components, no warmth, no inflection, just facts delivered like items from a list.
"I died. Odin's Valkyries collect the souls of women who fall in battle protecting something they love. I qualified. He chose me. I was reborn in Asgard with a new name and a new body and fragments of memory that took years to fully surface." She paused. "I have my old life's memories, Sirius. All of them. But I am not Lily Evans. I am not Lily Potter. I am Lilja Nornas, and the woman you knew has been gone for twenty years."
Sirius absorbed this in silence, his gaunt face working through expressions that chased each other too fast to identify.
"I used to dream about you in Azkaban," he said, and his voice cracked on the last word in a way that he clearly hadn't intended and couldn't take back. "You and James. The Dementors feed on happy memories, did you know that? They eat them. Literally consume them until there's nothing left. But the ones tied to guilt and grief, those they leave behind, because suffering is what sustains them and they want you to marinate in it." He swallowed hard. "My memories of you survived because they were soaked in guilt. Every laugh, every prank, every meal at the Potter table, every time you called me an idiot and meant it fondly, all of it preserved in perfect clarity because attached to each one was the knowledge that I failed you, that I convinced James to switch to Peter as Secret Keeper, that every happy memory I had of you came with a postscript that read and then she died because of a choice you made."
The tunnel felt very small suddenly, and very quiet, and I found myself walking a few steps ahead to give them space that I wasn't sure either of them would have asked for but both of them seemed to need.
"I don't hate you, Sirius," Lilja said behind me, and her voice had thawed by a single degree, from frozen to merely cold. "I'm furious with you for how you've treated Harry. That anger isn't going anywhere until you make it right. But I don't hate you…" A pause. "I understand what you went through better than most people could. I died. Dying changes you. Coming back changes you more. The woman I was before would have hugged you and cried and told you it wasn't your fault." Another pause, longer this time. "The woman I am now is telling you that you owe my son an apology, and that apologizing to him is the price of admission for being part of our lives again. That's non-negotiable."
Sirius didn't respond. I didn't look back to check his expression.
The tunnel opened ahead of us into a larger chamber where multiple passageways converged, the ceiling rising sharply and the walls pulling back to reveal a space that had been designed as some kind of junction or meeting point. Faded Chinese characters were carved into the stone above each tunnel mouth, and my language abilities translated them automatically into the same cheerful message repeated in slight variations: This is the threshold of the court of the honoured dead, beyond which the living are meat!
Really leaning into the hospitality motif. These guys should write travel brochures…
The chamber floor was covered in the same black water that had been our constant companion since descending, but the centre of the space was different. The water here was disturbed. And there, sitting in the water near the far wall, half-submerged and clearly abandoned, was a wand.
I waded over and picked it up.
"That's not Peter's original wand," Sirius said from behind me.
Lilja crouched at the water's edge to investigate the scene. "He was taken," she said. "Not killed. Something grabbed him from above, struck him hard enough to concuss, disarmed him, and dragged him..." She turned her head, following the invisible trail with her eyes. "...that way. Deeper. Toward a much larger concentration of undead energy. At least a hundred signatures, possibly more. Densely packed, stationary." She stood and looked at me. "Whatever lives at the heart of these tunnels has him."
Peter Pettigrew was the man who had sold Lilja's previous life to Voldemort. He was the man who had gotten Lily Evans killed and baby ME nearly murdered. He was the man who had framed Sirius for a crime that cost him eighteen years in a cage surrounded by soul-eating demons. Every single person standing in this sewage-flooded chamber wanted him dead with a ferocity that went beyond revenge into something primal and absolute, a need for closure that transcended mere anger.
And he had just been dragged into the heart of a foreign supernatural faction's underground court, which meant going after him meant walking into unknown territory, unknown numbers, unknown capabilities, and potentially starting a diplomatic incident with a faction I knew nothing about beyond the fact that their rank-and-file soldiers were undead Chinese vampires who shrugged off water magic and hopped at you with their claws out.
Smart move is to leave. Pettigrew's been captured. The Jiangshi court has him. Not my problem. Walk away, report it to Mum, let the grown-ups handle the diplomacy…
But if we walk away, Pettigrew might talk his way out. He's done it before. He talked his way into the Weasley family for twelve years. He convinced Voldemort to keep him alive despite being completely useless. The rat's only real skill is convincing more powerful beings not to kill him, and if the Jiangshi court decides he's useful as a bargaining chip or an information source, he could slip away again.
And Lilja will never forgive me for letting the man who murdered her walk away.
And Sirius will never stop hunting him, which means Sirius will go in alone if I don't, and he'll die down here.
I looked at Lilja. She was already looking at me with an expression that said she knew exactly what decision I was going to make and was simply waiting for me to say it out loud so she could be proud of me for it.
I looked at Sirius, who had his jaw set and his stolen wand raised and the specific kind of desperate determination on his face that said he was going into that tunnel whether we came with him or not.
"We're going in," I said.
Lilja's rapier caught the fungal light as she brought it up to guard position, the rune-etched blade humming with quiet anticipation.
Sirius exhaled through his nose.
"About time," he said.
We moved into the tunnel together.
The passage sloped downward at a gentle gradient that carried us deeper beneath the city with every step, the carved walls growing more elaborate and the bioluminescent fungi growing thicker and brighter until the tunnel was illuminated in a constant, eerie blue-green twilight that made every surface look like it was underwater. The air grew colder. The smell changed, the sewage stench fading, replaced by something drier, older, the scent of preserved death mixed with incense.
The tunnel widened one final time, and then opened, and the three of us stepped out onto a narrow stone ledge overlooking a cavern that had no business existing beneath a modern city.
It was enormous.
The ceiling arched a hundred feet above us, supported by carved pillars of dark stone that rose from a floor of polished black marble, each pillar covered in relief carvings depicting centuries of history rendered in obsessive, intricate detail.
Hundreds of Jiangshi stood in the cavern below us.
They were arranged in perfect, motionless rows on the polished marble floor, arms at their sides, faces forward, bodies rigidly upright and utterly still, like a terracotta army brought to horrible un-life. Rank after rank of them, extending from the base of the ledge where we stood all the way to the far end of the cavern, each one dressed in burial robes that varied in age and style from recently interred to several centuries old, and not a single one of them moved so much as a finger.
At the far end of the cavern, a raised stone platform served as a throne area, accessed by a flight of broad steps and flanked by standing braziers that burned with pale, flameless light. And on that platform, on his knees with his hands bound behind his back by something that looked like woven strips of funeral silk, was Peter Pettigrew.
He was bleeding from a gash on his forehead. His filthy robes were soaked through. His eyes were wide and rolling with terror, and when he saw us step onto the ledge his mouth opened and a sound came out that might have been a plea for help if it hadn't been strangled halfway by a gag made of the same funeral silk that bound his wrists.
Standing over him, one hand resting on Peter's shoulder with the casual possessiveness of a cat with a mouse, was a figure that made every Jiangshi we had fought in the tunnels look low rank.
This one was tall, taller than me, draped in elaborate burial robes of black and deep crimson silk embroidered with gold thread in patterns that depicted dragons and clouds and characters I recognized as imperial court honorifics. Its face was not frozen in the mindless rictus grin of the lesser Jiangshi but composed, elegant even, the features of a man who had been handsome in life and whose death had preserved that a bit more than the other corpses around him.
Those eyes found us on the ledge, and a thin smile crossed its perfect, dead face.
"Ah," it said, in English, accented with a dialect that had not been spoken casually in at least two centuries. "More visitors. How delightful." The smile widened by a fraction. "We so rarely receive living guests." A pause that stretched and held with theatrical precision. "Fewer still leave that way."
The army of the dead stood motionless between us and the platform.
Peter Pettigrew whimpered through his gag.
I didn't usually like having to rely on my mother's name and influence, but I considered for a moment and decided it might be the best play in these circumstances. I stepped forwards with Lilja and Sirius watching me—Sirius more nervous than Lilja—and I spoke up.
"My name is Harry Sitri and I am the son of the current Maou Leviathan. We apologize for intruding on your domain, but we were tracking down a wanted criminal that has wronged my family and clan. Your current captive."
Peter's eyes went wide with what looked to be hope and he let out muffled squeaks and groans beneath his gag.
Sirius immediately shattered that hope with a nasty snarl and scowl, "We're not here to bloody save you, you sniveling rat. We're here to kill you painfully and slowly."
"Do you recognize me, Peter? It's been a while, hasn't it?" Lilja spoke up next and stepped next to me. Peter's eyes immediately went wide with recognition, it looked like he did recognize her.
He tried to mumble something along the lines of "Lily" or "Impossible" underneath his gag. He squirmed harder to try and escape but it looked like the ropes he was bound with were enchanted to cut off his access to his magic.
I turned to look at Lilja—my beautiful Valkyrie Queen—and even I shivered upon seeing the expression of cold fury on her face. Her eyes were literally glowing like bright emeralds, full of feminine malice and fury. The runes on her armor were shining bright silver with all the ambient demonic energy that was being released from her body in her rage as well. Her gaze was solely locked on him, at that moment, and on nothing else.
Peter Pettigrew whimpered dejectedly under his gag…
I heard mutterings in ancient Chinese from the hundreds of jiangshi corpses surrounding us. I could see some of their bodies jerking in excitement, and others seemed to be hissing with those guttural voices in anger.
"A devil! A devil is here!"
"The betrayers! The ones that didn't hold up their end of the bargain!"
"His mother is one of their leaders; we should kill him and send a message!"
The lead corpse spoke up again, hissing loudly in ancient Chinese this time. "Silence!" he declared, and it was creepy how all the others immediately listened to him and went very quiet and very still, like we were standing in the middle of a tomb. He then spoke up again in English in our direction. "You… You are a devil. You are as beautiful as the last devil that graced our court centuries ago. You and the redhaired warrior woman standing at your side…"
"Thanks?" I wondered where he was going with this?
"I don't think this is going to end diplomatically," Lilja's breath ghosted across my ear as she whispered.
The lead Jiangshi continued, "You are beautiful, and yet you don't appreciate it. Look at us! Look upon what we have become—the price of immortality! We are hideous! We cannot blend in with our food, we cannot go above ground without being scorned and hunted! But your kind created a way to change that! Your evil pieces! They could have restored the beauty we lost in undeath! We Jiangshi feed on the life force of our victims and you devils feed on souls! We could have been perfect allies!"
Huh, I feel like his information about modern devils is a bit dated here…
He continued his rant regardless. As far as villain and monster rants went, I rated it around a 5 or 6. I'd honestly heard better at this point in my life…
"...We offered to share the souls of Zhongguo with you devils if you restored our beauty to us! To allow us to walk in the daylight again! We thought these terms to be reasonable and fair when we sent envoys to your kind, devil! And yet your Maous rejected our generous offers again and again!" he spat out, and despite the rigor mortis in his body, I could still see him twitching with growing anger as he finished his rant.
I wasn't even sure how to reply to all of it either.
Sorry about that bro, we devils don't eat souls anymore…
Plus, helping a bunch of life force eating monsters take over China would just piss off the Heavenly Court. No supernatural faction in this world wanted the Court to send that "crazy munkey" Wukong after them in retaliation. Those were Serafall's words as well. Wukong and his descendants were all insane battle junkies, according to her, and they didn't care how much collateral damage they caused in the pursuit of a good fight.
I snapped myself out of my thoughts and back to the present where it looked like the leader had come to his decision. He switched back to ancient Chinese again: "My brethren, kill the human and capture the two devils! We will rip the secrets of their beauty from their very souls!"
Sirius nervously looked around. "...I don't even speak Chinese and yet somehow I know the gist of that whole conversation… They want to kill us."
"That about sums it up," Lilja said and gripped her rapier tightly. She leaned over and kissed me on the lips briefly. The anger in her eyes was replaced with fondness as she looked at me, which then became focused determination. "For good luck, now let's slay some draugr and get that fucking rat!"
XXX