Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows hp-7 Read online

Lupin swallowed.

  “I—I made a grave mistake in marrying Tonks. I did it against my better judgment and have regretted it very much every since.”

  “I see,” said Harry, “so you’re just going to dump her and the kid and run off with us?”

  Lupin sprang to his feet: His chair toppled over backward, and he glared at them so fiercely that Harry saw, for the first time ever, the shadow of the wolf upon his human face.

  “Don’t you understand what I’ve done to my wife and my unborn child? I should never have married her, I’ve made her an outcast!”

  Lupin kicked aside the chair he had overturned.

  “You have only ever seen me amongst the Order, or under Dumbledore’s protection at Hogwarts! You don’t know how most of the Wizarding world sees creatures like me! When they know of my affliction, they can barely talk to me! Don’t you see what I’ve done? Even her own family is disgusted by our marriage, what parents want their only daughter to marry a werewolf? And the child—the child—”

  Lupin actually seized handfuls of his own hair; he looked quite deranged.

  “My kind don’t usually breed! It will be like me, I am convinced of it—how can I forgive myself, when I knowingly risked passing on my own condition to an innocent child? And if, by some miracle, it is not like me, then it will be better off, a hundred times so, without a father of whom it must always be ashamed!”

  “Remus!” whispered Hermione, tears in her eyes. “Don’t say that—how could any child be ashamed of you?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Hermione,” said Harry. “I’d be pretty ashamed of him.”

  Harry did not know where his rage was coming from, but it had propelled him to his feet too. Lupin looked as though Harry had hit him.

  “If the new regime thinks Muggle-borns are bad,” Harry said, “what will they do to a half-werewolf whose father’s in the Order? My father died trying to protect my mother and me, and you reckon he’d tell you to abandon your kid to go on an adventure with us?”

  “How—how dare you?” said Lupin. “This is not about a desire for—for danger or personal glory—how dare you suggest such a—”

  “I think you’re feeling a bit of a daredevil,” Harry said, “You fancy stepping into Sirius’s shoes—”

  “Harry, no!” Hermione begged him, but he continued to glare into Lupin’s livid face.

  “I’d never have believed this,” Harry said. “The man who taught me to fight Dementors—a coward.”

  Lupin drew his wand so fast that Harry had barely reached for his own; there was a loud bang and he felt himself flying backward as if punched; as he slammed into the kitchen wall and slid to the floor, he glimpsed the tail of Lupin’s cloak disappearing around the door.

  “Remus, Remus, come back!” Hermione cried, but Lupin did not respond. A moment later they heard the front door slam.

  “Harry!” wailed Hermione. “How could you?”

  “It was easy,” said Harry. He stood up, he could feel a lump swelling where his head had hit the wall. He was still so full of anger he was shaking.

  “Don’t look at me like that!” he snapped at Hermione.

  “Don’t you start on her!” snarled Ron.

  “No—no—we mustn’t fight!” said Hermione, launching herself between them.

  “You shouldn’t have said that stuff to Lupin,” Ron told Harry.

  “He had it coming to him,” said Harry. Broken images were racing each other through his mind: Sirius falling through the veil; Dumbledore suspended, broken, in midair; a flash of green light and his mother’s voice, begging for mercy…

  “Parents,” said Harry, “shouldn’t leave their kids unless—unless they’ve got to.”

  “Harry—” said Hermione, stretching out a consoling hand, but he shrugged it off and walked away, his eyes on the fire Hermione had conjured. He had once spoken to Lupin out of that fireplace, seeking reassurance about James, and Lupin had consoled him. Now Lupin’s tortured white face seemed to swim in the air before him. He felt a sickening surge of remorse. Neither Ron nor Hermione spoke, but Harry felt sure that they were looking at each other behind his back, communicating silently.

  He turned around and caught them turning hurriedly away form each other.

  “I know I shouldn’t have called him a coward.”

  “No, you shouldn’t,” said Ron at once.

  “But he’s acting like one.”

  “All the same…” said Hermione.

  “I know,” said Harry. “But if it makes him go back to Tonks, it’ll be worth it, won’t it?”

  He could not keep the plea out of his voice. Hermione looked sympathetic, Ron uncertain. Harry looked down at his feet, thinking of his father. Would James have backed Harry in what he had said to Lupin, or would he have been angry at how his son had treated his old friend?

  The silent kitchen seemed to hum with the shock of the recent scene and with Ron and Hermione’s unspoken reproaches. The Daily Prophet Lupin had brought was still lying on the table, Harry’s own face staring up at the ceiling from the front page. He walked over to it and sat down, opened the paper at random, and pretended to read. He could not take in the words; his mind was still too full of the encounter with Lupin. He was sure that Ron and Hermione had resumed their silent communications on the other side of the Prophet. He turned a page loudly, and Dumbledore’s name leapt out at him. It was a moment or two before he took in the meaning of the photograph, which showed a family group. Beneath the photograph were the words: The Dumbledore family, left to right: Albus; Percival, holding newborn Ariana; Kendra, and Aberforth.

  His attention caught, Harry examined the picture more carefully. Dumbledore’s father, Percival, was a good-looking man with eyes that seemed to twinkle even in this faded old photograph. The baby, Ariana, was a little longer than a loaf of bread and no more distinctive-looking. The mother, Kendra, had jet black hair pulled into a high bun. Her face had a carved quality about it. Harry thought of photos of Native Americans he’d seen as he studied her dark eyes, high cheekbones, and straight nose, formally composed above a high-necked silk gown. Albus and Aberforth wore matching lacy collared jackets and had identical, shoulder-length hairstyles. Albus looked several years older, but otherwise the two boys looked very alike, for this was before Albus’s nose had been broken and before he started wearing glasses.

  The family looked quite happy and normal, smiling serenely up out of the newspaper. Baby Ariana’s arm waved vaguely out of her shawl. Harry looked above the picture and saw the headline:

  EXCLUSIVE EXTRACT FROM UPCOMING

  BIOGRAPHY OF ALBUS DUMBLEDORE

  by Rita Skeeter

  Thinking it could hardly make him feel any worse than he already did, Harry began to read:

  Proud and haughty, Kendra Dumbledore could not bear to remain in Mould-on-the-Wold after her husband Percival’s well-publicized arrest and imprisonment in Azkaban. She therefore decided to uproot the family and relocate to Godric’s Hollow, the village that was later to gain fame as the scene of Harry Potter’s strange escape from You-Know-Who.

  Like Mould-on-the-Wold, Godric’s Hollow was home to a number of Wizarding families, but as Kendra knew none of them, she would be spared the curiosity about her husband’s crime she had faced in her former village. By repeatedly rebuffing the friendly advances of her new Wizarding neighbors, she soon ensured that her family was left well alone.

  “Slammed the door in my face when I went around to welcome her with a batch of homemade Cauldron Cakes,” says Bathilda Bagshot. “The first year they were there I only ever saw the two boys. Wouldn’t have known there was a daughter if I hadn’t been picking Plangentines by moonlight the winter after they moved in, and saw Kendra leading Ariana out into the back garden. Walked her round the lawn once, keeping a firm grip on her, then took her back inside. Didn’t know what to make of it.”

  It seems that Kendra thought the move to Godric’s Hollow was the perfect opportunity to hide Ariana once and for all,
something she had probably been planning for years. The timing was significant. Ariana was barely seven years old when she vanished from sight, and seven is the age by which most experts agree that magic will have revealed itself, if present. Nobody now alive remembers Ariana ever demonstrating even the slightest sign of magical ability. It seems clear, therefore, that Kendra made a decision to hide her daughter’s existence rather than suffer the shame of admitting that she had produced a Squib. Moving away from the friends and neighbors who knew Ariana would, of course, make imprisoning her all the easier. The tiny number of people who henceforth knew of Ariana’s existence could be counted upon to keep the secret, including her two brothers, who had deflected awkward questions with the answer their mother had taught them. “My sister is too frail for school.”

  Next week: Albus Dumbledore at Hogwarts—the Prizes and the Pretense.

  Harry had been wrong: What he had read had indeed made him feel worse. He looked back at the photograph of the apparently happy family. Was it true? How could he find out? He wanted to go to Godric’s Hollow, even if Bathilda was in no fit state to talk to him: he wanted to visit the place where he and Dumbledore had both lost loved ones. He was in the process of lowering the newspaper, to ask Ron’s and Hermione’s opinions, when a deafening crack echoed around the kitchen.

  For the first time in three days Harry had forgotten all about Kreacher. His immediate thought was that Lupin had burst back into the room, and for a split second, he did not take in the mass of struggling limbs that had appeared out of thin air right beside his chair. He hurried to his feet as Kreacher disentangled himself and, bowing low to Harry, croaked, “Kreacher has returned with the thief Mundungus Fletcher, Master.”

  Mundungus scrambled up and pulled out his wand; Hermione, however, was too quick for him.

  “Expelliarmus!”

  Mundungus’s wand soared into the air, and Hermione caught it. Wild-eyed, Mundungus dived for the stairs. Ron rugby-tackled him and Mundungus hit the stone floor with a muffled crunch.

  “What?” he bellowed, writhing in his attempts to free himself from Ron’s grip. “Wha’ve I done? Setting a bleedin’ ’ouse-elf on me, what are you playing at, wha’ve I done, lemme go, lemme go, or—”

  “You’re not in much of a position to make threats,” said Harry. He threw aside the newspaper, crossed the kitchen in a few strides, and dropped to his knees beside Mundungus, who stopped struggling and looked terrified. Ron got up, panting, and watched as Harry pointed his wand deliberately at Mundungus’s nose. Mundungus stank of stale sweat and tobacco smoke. His hair was matted and his robes stained.

  “Kreacher apologizes for the delay in bringing the thief, Master,” croaked the elf. “Fletcher knows how to avoid capture, has many hidey-holes and accomplices. Nevertheless, Kreacher cornered the thief in the end.”

  “You’ve done really well, Kreacher,” said Harry, and the elf bowed low.

  “Right, we’ve got a few questions for you,” Harry told Mundungus, who shouted at once.

  “I panicked, okay? I never wanted to come along, no offense, mate, but I never volunteered to die for you, an’ that was bleedin’ You-Know-Who come flying at me, anyone woulda got outta there. I said all along I didn’t wanna do it—”

  “For your information, none of the rest of us Disapparated,” said Hermione.

  “Well, you’re a bunch of bleedin’ ’eroes then, aren’t you, but I never pretended I was up for killing meself—”

  “We’re not interested in why you ran out on Mad-Eye,” said Harry, moving his wand a little closer to Mundungus’s baggy, bloodshot eyes. “We already knew you were an unreliable bit of scum.”

  “Well then, why the ’ell am I being ’unted down by ’ouse-elves? Or is this about them goblets again? I ain’t got none of ’em left, or you could ’ave ’em—”

  “It’s not about the goblets either, although you’re getting warmer,” said Harry. “Shut up and listen.”

  It felt wonderful to have something to do, someone of whom he could demand some small portion of truth. Harry’s wand was now so close to the bridge of Mundungus’s nose that Mundungus had gone cross-eyed trying to keep it in view.

  “When you cleaned out this house of anything valuable,” Harry began, but Mundungus interrupted him again.

  “Sirius never cared about any of the junk—”

  There was the sound of pattering fee, a blaze of shining copper, an echoing clang, and a shriek of agony; Kreacher had taken a run at Mundungus and hit him over the head with a saucepan.

  “Call ’im off, call ’im off, ’e should be locked up!” screamed Mundungus, cowering as Kreacher raised the heavy-bottomed pan again.

  “Kreacher, no!” shouted Harry.

  Kreacher’s thin arms trembled with the weight of the pan, still held aloft.

  “Perhaps just one more, Master Harry, for luck?”

  Ron laughed.

  “We need him conscious, Kreacher, but if he needs persuading, you can do the honors,” said Harry.

  “Thank you very much, Master,” said Kreacher with a bow, and he retreated a short distance, his great pale eyes still fixed upon Mundungus with loathing.

  “When you stripped this house of all the valuables you could find,” Harry began again, “you took a bunch of stuff from the kitchen cupboard. There was a locket there.” Harry’s mouth was suddenly dry: He could sense Ron and Hermione’s tension and excitement too. “What did you do with it?”

  “Why?” asked Mundungus. “Is it valuable?”

  “You’ve still got it!” cried Hermione.

  “No, he hasn’t,” said Ron shrewdly. “He’s wondering whether he should have asked more money for it.”

  “More?” said Mundungus. “That wouldn’t have been effing difficult… bleedin’ gave it away, di’n’ I? No choice.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I was selling in Diagon Alley and she come up to me and asks if I’ve got a license for trading in magical artifacts. Bleedin’ snoop. She was gonna fine me, but she took a fancy to the locket an’ told me she’d take it and let me off that time, and to fink meself lucky.”

  “Who was this woman?” asked Harry.

  “I dunno, some Ministry hag.”

  Mundungus considered for a moment, brow wrinkled.

  “Little woman. Bow on top of ’er head.”

  He frowned and then added, “Looked like a toad.”

  Harry dropped his wand: It hit Mundungus on the nose and shot red sparks into his eyebrows, which ignited.

  “Aquamenti!” screamed Hermione, and a jet of water streamed from her wand, engulfing a spluttering and choking Mundungus.

  Harry looked up and saw his own shock reflected in Ron’s and Hermione’s faces. The scars on the back of his right hand seemed to be tingling again.

  12. MAGIC IS MIGHT

  As August wore on, the square of unkempt grass in the middle of Grimmauld Place shriveled in the sun until it was brittle and brown. The inhabitants of number twelve were never seen by anyone in the surrounding houses, and nor was number twelve itself. The Muggles who lived in Grimmauld Place had long since accepted the amusing mistake in the numbering that had caused number eleven to sit beside number thirteen.

  And yet the square was now attracting a trickle of visitors who seemed to find the anomaly most intriguing. Barely a day passed without one or two people arriving in Grimmauld Place with no other purpose, or so it seemed, than to lean against the railings facing numbers eleven and thirteen, watching the join between the two houses. The lurkers were never the same two days running, although they all seemed to share a dislike for normal clothing. Most of the Londoners who passed them were used to eccentric dressers and took little notice, though occasionally one of them might glance back, wondering why anyone would wear cloaks in this heat.

  The watchers seemed to be gleaning little satisfaction from their vigil. Occasionally one of them started forward excitedly, as if they had seen something interesting at last, onl
y to fall back looking disappointed.

  On the first day of September there were more people lurking in the square than ever before. Half a dozen men in long cloaks stood silent and watchful, gazing as ever at houses eleven and thirteen, but the thing for which they were waiting still appeared elusive. As evening drew in, bringing with it an unexpected gust of chilly rain for the first time in weeks, there occurred one of those inexplicable moments when they appeared to have seen something interesting. The man with the twisted face pointed and his closest companion, a podgy, pallid man, started forward, but a moment later they had relaxed into their previous state of inactivity, looking frustrated and disappointed.

  Meanwhile, inside number twelve, Harry had just entered the hall. He had nearly lost his balance as he Apparated onto the top step just outside the front door, and thought that the Death Eaters might have caught a glimpse of his momentarily exposed elbow. Shutting the front door carefully behind him, he pulled off the Invisibility Cloak, draped it over his arm, and hurried along the gloomy hallway toward the door that led to the basement, a stolen copy of the Daily Prophet clutched in his hand.

  The usual low whisper of “Severus Snape” greeted him, the chill wind swept him, and his tongue rolled up for a moment.

  “I didn’t kill you,” he said, once it had unrolled, then held his breath as the dusty jinx-figure exploded. He waited until he was halfway down the stairs to the kitchen, out of earshot of Mrs. Black and clear of the dust cloud, before calling, “I’ve got news, and you won’t like it.”

  The kitchen was almost unrecognizable. Every surface now shone; copper pots and pans had been burnished to a rosy glow; the wooden tabletop gleamed; the goblets and plates already laid for dinner glinted in the light from a merrily blazing fire, on which a cauldron was simmering. Nothing in the room, however, was more dramatically different than the house-elf who now came hurrying toward Harry, dressed in a snowy-white towel, his ear hair as clean and fluffy as cotton wool, Regulus’s locket bouncing on his thin chest.

  “Shoes off, if you please, Master Harry, and hands washed before dinner,” croaked Kreacher, seizing the Invisibility Cloak and slouching off to hang it on a hook on the wall, beside a number of old-fashioned robes that had been freshly laundered.