Chapter 3
Whitechapel, London.
1979.
One would be hard pressed to refer to the Ouroboros as ethical - but they certainly could have been worse. It was a upright order, at the very least. They didn’t kill mudbloods, if that was any consolation. Unlike the Deatheaters, who reveled in causing as much chaos as possible, who dragged men and women out of dens in the night, slit their throats in the name of blood supremacy and worshipped a figure so far from godly that he would more closely resemble the devil. Dually, the Ouroboros were different from the Vitruvian, who paid no mind to the cleansing of blood, but sought for the wizarding populace to rule both the muggle and magical world with the power of the light.
The Ouroboros and the Deatheaters had one thing in common. They were intelligent enough to understand that anything worth taking had to be thieved in the dark. But, their tactics were dissimilar. Enoch Ames had long ago partnered with the heads of magical creature factions that had formed across Britain. It wouldn’t have been a shock to find a centaur sipping tea in the galley of the boathouse, a Veela’s head thrown back in laughter as she grazed a sensual finger over the rim of her cup. Tommy didn’t like the way the vampires showed up in the night, reeking of coagulated blood, stood stark against a full moon on the fire escapes. Though, she couldn’t deny they had been useful more than once.
Perhaps, the greatest difference between the three was their choice in clothing. Black was the force that swept across England, great swaths of it that formed serpents in the sky to harken in a band of Deatheaters like a morbid parade of the dammed. The Vitruvian wore white.
Tommy thought emerald green was a perfectly sensible color.
“Three minutes,” she claimed, her pale form starkly contrasted against the cloud of green essence she had erupted from in the center of Nocturne alley. “White smoke rising over Kings Cross station.”
Sinai Novak had already disappeared, the remainder of Tommy’s sentence chasing after her as she crashed through the stained glass of Borgin and Burkes. Tommy was on the verge of giving another time estimate, but it fell moot in the closed quarters. Sinai was already holding the shopkeeper at wand point.
“The death mask,” Tommy said, holding out a paper with the artifacts silouhette scrawled over gold leaf.
It smelled of mildew and parchment, fear and sweat. The shopkeeper screamed, they always did. But in the end, with Sinai’s wand tip crushing his windpipe, he adjusted his spectacles and looked at the page. “I haven’t seen it in ten years. It was purchased by a private collector.”
“Specifically?” Tommy asked.
Terrified from gut to gleam in his eye, the shopkeeper squinted to make a recollection. He offered the crack of a laugh, and the bob of his adams apple as he choked down the truth. “I would have to check my records.”
“I should turn you inside out like a trout and eat your entrails,” Sinai whispered into his ear. Her crimson tongue grazed his earlobe, voice low and haunting. They had ran through the proper protocol for these types of situations one hundred times over. It never mattered. The moment Sinai was in the throws of a fight, she chameleoned from morose to blood lust. Which was exactly why she made such a productive right hand.
Further threats were muffled by the door losing its hinges all over the scuffed wood flooring. It had already been dark in the space, in alongside artifacts and tomes that cast grey shadows on the hoarders walls. The entrance of Atlan Baatar made it darker still, his green robes sashaying with hollow steps toward the counter. He took a bite of an apple that he stole from the shopkeepers basket, pearled teeth crunching down before rolling it into the pit of a vase that had been toppled over.
“How long?” He asked, his smooth Mongolian accent echoing.
“Thirty seconds,” Tommy returned, and winked at the shopkeeper. “We’ll be back. Do try to remember where you sent that mask. I’ll take an artifact in exchange until you have a moment to pour over those records.”
Atlan Baatar brought his heavy hand down on the glass counter case. Tommy’s view was blocked as to how many pieces of jewelry, embossed runes and cuffs that he gleaned into the pocket of his robes. It was certainly less than what the death mask was worth. But, if nothing else, it would put a damper on the shops business until the owner was wise enough to come forward with what he knew.
They were children no longer. No sketch of their orphaned faces remaining, no gaunt hollows of cheeks, nor nicks on their crowns from the cutting of lice. Tommy was tall, Atlan taller. What Sinai lacked in height she made up for in brute strength. She kept her dark hair pulled into braids with strings of leather. Tommy left hers straight and free flowing. If she needed to act like a fox, she might as well look like one too.
It was their speed that made them distinguishable from one another as they broke in a flurry of shooting smoke through the shops windows. Tommy moved at the forefront, a shooting star that guided the others toward the belly of the city. Made further differentiated by the puffs of white that chased them over the Thames, from Whitechapel to Westminster, over the river and down an underground mail tunnel. Outside, in flight, the scent of mildew vanished in the night winds. London smelled of ash and rot, of looming storms and spilt oil slick. A sickening cacophony of bins left out on streets with few workers left to retrieve them. Of fumes from car exhausts mingled in gasses made of magic. The killing curse carried the scent of petrichor and salt as it ricocheted from pipes behind Tommy, spraying water down the alleys of the underground.
For an organization that prided themselves on ethical magic, the Vitruvian were not gentle in their use of the curses. By any means necessary, was their call to action. But, it wasn’t in tune with their other mantra. Not very, we light the dark, of them.
There were benefits to the massive waves of muggle emigration from the city. There was always somewhere empty to hide. Those that did not wish to become martyrs vanished overnight, leaving flat blocks vacant and shops with swaying ‘closed’ signs. London had lost millions to the waves of people who searched for higher ground. As Tommy broke through the window of an upper story apartment, she could caught a voice through an abandoned radio, static and spectral, a news anchor still spilling the ludicrous notion that the cause of the black fog was merely a strange weather phenomena; that the populace had nothing to fear and they should not quit their jobs to move to the countryside. The sun will shine again.
The downside was that there were only a few million muggles left to do the menial tasks that kept a city running; repair infrastructure, boost the economy and operate trains. The tube always ran on a strange and unpredictable schedule, one that only Tommy could see with her ability to view which station the cars had pulled into at any given time. The upshot was that Tommy arrived in a train car at the exact moment that the engine pummeled a Vitruvian into sparks of white ash, and Sinai careened through the station with Atlan at her side.
Tommy’s boots thundered down the carriage. The second Vitruvian was behind her, but he wouldn’t make a spectacle, not in front of the people that his leader was trying so hard to defend so that she could overthrow them when the time was right. Muggles leaned their heads back on the windows, white button down shirts open, dresses smattered with black from the oleaginous fog. They paid little mind to the girl who appeared in front of them seemingly out of the mist. But, did they ever? Had they one singular time, opened their eyes and saw what was happening around them? Highly doubtful. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have been there.
She opened the door to an empty carriage, paused halfway down the aisle and produced her wand. It had been a gift. Human bone wands were hard to come by, especially a form of it so meticulously carved into a pointed tip and smattered with the etchings of ancient runes. It was the most expensive thing she owned.
She waited until the carriage door clicked close. The Vitruvian took a step. Tommy turned. Her shoulders slumped as she raised her top lip. She hadn’t known the Vitruvian, there was no friendly rapport between the two factions that would have made her heart swell with sorrow to see him bleeding great spurts from his mouth all over the blue linoleum. Her annoyance was in the haste of it, how quickly he had fallen at the hands of a male in black garbs that had transposed out of the walls. The Deatheater gripped the white cloak of the fallen man before tossing him into an empty row.
“I was going to do that,” she pouted. “He chased me all the way from Nocturne to the west.”
“I saw,” The stranger claimed, voice like the death rattle gurgle of a river bed. He was young, no more than a year or two her senior, with drenched curls laid spritely over high cheekbones. Eyes bright and encircled with black coal. He reminded her of Gawain Parkinson, the only Deatheater she had ever come into vocal contact with.
The Ouroboros had no direct affiliation with Voldemort and his band of heathens. The Deatheaters despised mudbloods and the Order was wholly composed of them. Yet, their commonalties, a use of dark magic and a shared disgust for the Vitruvian, laid their frameworks closer than any other cult. A closeness that felt like claustrophobia as the train screamed through a tunnel, metal rocking as a turn jostled compartment doors open. Tommy gripped her wand. The stranger patted his against his thigh.
“Typically, Voldemort sends Gawain if he needs to contact us,” Tommy said. “Who the hell are you?”
He laughed, “Gawain is dead. Didn’t you hear? Crumpled up on the East end pavement like a discarded tissue.” He turned his attention to the lifeless body in the seat. “Holding a white scrap of fabric.”
“A shame. He was tolerable.” Tommy sighed. She didn’t have a great reverence for many people, especially those on opposite spectrums of the war. Yet, Gawain had been a man made of steel, quick witted and slow tempered. He would have made a fantastic member of the Ouroboros if she had been able to sway him toward the better side. “That has to be the first Deatheater killed by a Vitruvian.”
The stranger cracked his neck, “I’m surprised you didn’t see it happening.”
“I wasn’t looking.”
“Isn’t that unwise?” He asked in a mocking tone. “I figured your eyes would be trained on the enemy at all moments.”
“I can see your friends have arrived in the wrong carriage.” The image played in the back of her mind. Two of them dampered in dark shrouds, stepping through a mass of bodies.
He waved a flippant hand, “These damn things never run on schedule.”
“They would if you stopped killing all of the conductors.”
“The ouroboros do not have any more respect for muggle life than we do,” he enunciated each word, drawing out the later vowels with a hiss. “You just pretend to. That is our common ground. Let me offer you some camaraderie. Do you know Caius Avery? Big, wild eyed son of a bitch. He likes to flay girls alive.” He raised a thumb over his shoulder. “You can surely see him coming now.”
Tommy raised her lip, chin pointed to the windows and the splotches of lantern light sopping through them. “I have one of those too.”
“It’s good to have a friend,” he smirked. “But, yours isn’t here. Mine is. I can step away from the door and let him through, or we can come to an arrangement.”
Big and wild eyed or not, Caius wasn’t quicker than Tommy. She could see him floundering down the aisles, hips bumped on seat backs and heavy head ducked beneath the roof. They were coming up on the next station, she could be out of the car and blowing East in a puff of smoke while his ankles were still rolling up the escalator. There was, however, an intrigue in such a display. This sharp, dark, boy wanted something from her. It was always beneficial to know what the other side sought.
“Explain,” she ordered.
“You’re looking for the death mask,” he said matter of factly.
Tommy shrugged, “what is that?”
That. The only object which had ever truly mattered in the history of both mortal and wizarding creation. The genesis; the beginning, the end and all manner of existence in between. That intricate masquerade that promised immortality to the wearer, so long as they kept it tucked tight against their nose bridge. There were downsides to such an object, of course, the risk of it forming with ones own face. An inability to seek the soft respite of the afterlife. It almost certainly guaranteed hell, considering the ritual one had to commit to form it to their profile. Then again, any manner of life lived in such a world as the present was a promise of fury and flame in the underworld. As long as you couldn’t die, it didn’t really matter.
“You don’t look stupid,” he returned, “are you stupid? Surely, even orphanages have books. Did they not teach you to read? You know what it is, and I know you’re looking for it.”
“Why would Enoch want the death mask?” She asked, softly pouting her lips.
“I never said anything about Enoch Ames.”
The air tightened, a gust of wind billowing through the open doors. A mother and child stepped from the platform into the carriage, before quickly deciding another car might be safer. Tommy attributed that to the scent of lavender and smoke on the Deatheater. It certainly wasn’t her. She had worn her most sensible dress. The next station was two minutes away and the doors were closing with a rusted screech. Caius had come to the window behind the stranger, only his tawny chin visible from beneath a cloak hood.
“Say what you want,” Tommy ordered.
“I’ll help you find it,” he whispered. “I know where it is.”
Tommy laughed, “If you actually knew where it was, you wouldn’t bother approaching me without it in hand.”
He nodded singularly, “Fine. I have a general idea of where it is. I’ll bring you to it, as close as I can muster. In exchange, you do something for me. We need an end to this years long battle. The Vitruvian have grown far too powerful. It would make a much simpler fight if it were only the two of us waging blows. Vittra Nylan has to die.”
Tommy scoffed, “You want me to kill the most well protected woman in the world in exchange for the slight possibility that you aren’t lying to me? That doesn’t sound like a deal at all.”
“It’s the only deal you’re going to get,” he said, and stepped down the alley. From a closer proximity the lavender on his skin was choking, mingled with the finer elements of citric whiskey and french vanilla. “Shall we shake on it?”
The door propped open, Caius meandered into the first row of seats to check the pulse on the dead Vitruvian. Behind him, another male centered himself in the aisle. The station doors opened, the newcomers cloak blew off of his head. Tommy felt a pang of stark familiarity that she could not place.
She reached out her hand, fingertips nearly grazing the strangers. Then, she pulled them back ever so slightly. “What’s your name?”
“Regulus Black,” he claimed.
Tommy stood on a street corner in the East end and listened to a yard full of dogs bark at the sinking moon before Regulus’s vacant hand had the time to fall at his side.