Chapter 4
The boathouse had once been a decrepit shack used as a sanctuary for birds nests and excess chains. In a lot of ways it still resembled the original, worn wood falling into decay from years of river water seeping into the foundation. If one were ever lost, they could easily find the Ouroboros headquarters by scent alone; that of rotting fish and stagnant puddles. The door was almost always jammed by rust, and if it wasn’t, it was being held closed by a mechanism that mirrored a muggle bolt lock but could only be opened through recognition.
Tommy jostled the bronze knocker of a snake swallowing its own tail. When it wouldn’t give, she leaned in to peer through a hole in the frame. A bloodshot amber iris glanced back at her, blinked, and the lock flicked open.
Inside, the walls were thrice the size in height and twice that in width. Enoch Ames hadn’t skimped on the interior decoration. Tomes and sculptures lined the walls. Tommy passed a bust of a fractured Grindewald on the mantle place, dusting his nose with the tip of her finger. A Cornish pixie had made a nest in the highest bookshelf through the theft of Sinai’s leather hair bands and a discarded box of biscuits. There was more rolled parchment than any mortal could read in a lifetime, and half as many travel manifests spread out over the dark wooded furniture. It was a dim space, crawling with the memories of long dead men, and girls who had often wished that they were dead; and spirits of those who got their wish. The Ouroboros were not a wealthy order, unlike the Deatheaters who won their financing through the pillaging of vaults. Tommy’s makeshift family was a poor one, but hell, at least they were also unhappy.
“You’re alive,” Sinai said, her feet on the long dining room table and bandages down the ankles. It sounded almost defeated; on the verge of accepting the alternative. But the longer Sinai’s eyes drew over Tommy, the more it dawned on her that she had actually been worried. “I was going to send Atlan to look for you.”
“Deatheaters on the underground,” Tommy replied, the velveteen of her voice mingling with the wind blown drapes.
In her minds eye she watched the boys, even now, pummeling over London in fits of smoke. They paused momentarily to gain composure in Leicester Square, cloaks billowed on the foot of the art history museum. Regulus, Caius, and the outlier. She had been watching the unnamed one quite closely since leaving the train. The impossibility of his features; even his buzzed hair seemed thickly waved in what was left of it, honey colored eyes and a birthmark over his temple. She didn’t know him, but she had a distinct feeling that she knew someone quite close to that description.
Sinai blinked her honey colored eyes, thrummed a knuckle on the wood, and returned to bandaging her wounds. “What the hell do they want?”
“It was the youngest Black offspring mostly. He wanted to strike a deal. It was painfully obvious that he had nothing solid to give us in exchange, but at least I know his name now. I can follow them until they pass a veil ,” Tommy huffed, “what did you do to your feet?”
“Dogs,” Sinai said, “lost my footing in the wrong garden.”
Tommy nodded and leaned her head into the doorframe, “Gawain Parkinson is dead.”
Sinai’s eyes shot up once more, and trailed over Tommy as if she expected her to evaporate at any moment. She sighed, “He was tolerable.”
“That’s what I said. The Black boy is the worst of them, I can see it in his eyes. I wouldn’t be surprised if Voldemort were priming him for some higher position, if he hasn’t attained it already.”
“That family is loyal,” Sinai whispered.
Tommy sneered and pulled a notebook from her cloak pocket. The pages had been pilled down to almost nothing, ink smears disguising notes taken as far back as her thirteenth year. Most of it had been recopied into other journals, but she preferred to carry the master copy on her person. She flipped through until she came to the list of known Vitruvians and their attributes. With the sharp of her wand pointed to the page, she burned out what she had to assume were the two that had lost their lives on the train. Then, she moved onto the Deatheaters, a line through Gawain Parkinson, a question mark beside Regulus Black. Scanning the text, she came up short on any clue as to who the third could be. It would have been much simpler to write him off as a Lestrange cousin or Nott nephew.
“Tell me about your family,” she demanded , holding the notebook open as she surveyed Sinai over the binding.
“In five years, you have never asked me a single question about my bloodline,” Sinai chortled, “I figured you had that information locked away in your big throbbing brain, or at least filed in a cabinet somewhere.”
“I do,” Tommy replied, “Ancient pureblood line from the Slovak aristocracy. One of the last houses to join, fought alongside Grindewald until his dying breath. Your grandmother disowned your father after he shacked up with a muggle born. I’m asking, specifically, what they were like.”
Sinai’s eyes went glassy as she peered through the open window. Night, true night, had fallen with a chill to spite August. “I don’t remember.” She turned her attention back to Tommy. “Does it matter? You’re what I have for family now.”
Tommy flicked the notebook closed, “Lucky you.”
“Lucky me,” Sinai rolled her eyes so hard the whites were fully visible. “May I be excused of your pleasant company? I’m exhausted.”
The Huntress and the Alchemist couldn’t have been more different- The skills that Sinai owned from birth were of bloodshed and steel. Tommy had received another basket entirely. She plotted, she weaved, she made men into gold and removed the ‘im’ from possibility, especially when it came to the subject of living forever. At the base of the rounding staircase, she wiped a finger over the bannister and checked it for ash. There wasn’t any smoke rising in that house, which was a good sign, despite the fire eyed creature cross legged on the table.
“Tommy?” Sinai called after her.
“Sinai,” she answered.
“You didn’t say what Regulus was bargaining? What have they got?”
Tommy turned her attention to the rafters. Thumps shook the floorboards in the upper story, someone else was about despite the late hour. “A means to an end, if they have anything at all. Though, like I said, I sincerely doubt it,” and continued up the stairs.
One can remove children from orphanages and call it a home, but if you stock high walls to the brim with orphans, it simply becomes a halfway house. The headquarters had once been so full of children that it became hard to step without squishing one. At least thirty of them, half as many adults. Then there were a handful of adults and a bushel of children. When that number dwindled down to five narrowed eyed youths, the adults had mostly been picked off in one way or another, or had left for safer pastures. Thus, there was Enoch, and his handful of bastards.
Near the window in a boarding room, the twins sat cross legged on the floor slipping a marble back and forth to each other. Their sleeping shorts and shirtless torsos crumpled over under dirty white socks. Arkady and Dmitri Kallizov were much too old for games, but they were also inherently creepy to be in the company of, so marbles was a perfect alternative to haunting the house with screeches and displays of magic that would have constituted a stay in Azkaban if the prison was still open.
The boarding dorms were wide and harrowing rooms with sterile beds lined up in perfect rows, adorned with scratchy cotton sheets and brass hardware. When the house was full, Tommy had to fight for a cot near the window. Now, she had an entire room to herself. The first order of business had been burning those sheets and replacing them with the unicorn hair threads from the guest rooms. The second order of business had been installing a lock. She picked it with her pinky nail, aware of the key having gone missing some weeks ago. It would have been just as easy to pry it open with magic, but some habits died screaming.
Halfway into the room, eyes locked on the cushioned bed and coffee pot bubbling on the fireplace, she turned, flicked the lock, and started further down the hall.
A chill crept in through the stained glass windows, specifically, from an angel missing her eye in the center of a depiction. Enoch wasn’t naturally religious, but one wouldn’t be able to tell on decor alone. Tommy figured he had gotten the idea to spread catholic ornamentation throughout the house in order to remind the children that their time on this earth was finite and fleeting. Constant reminders of mortality only served to rally Tommy against the construct.
No, Enoch was not a Godly man, but he kept a cross above his bed. That, and a floating chandelier with one too few bulbs that casted amber shadows over the otherwise pitch black room. He was sleeping when she entered, undisturbed by her nimble feet on the creaky boards and the hitch in her breath as she approached the mass below the quilts.
When Tommy had first met Enoch she was struck by his sharp features. If one were not careful they could slip and cut themselves on the man. Even then, he looked sharp, possibly even more so, only in the wrong places. His collarbones had sunk in from the lack of sustenance. It was sometimes so difficult to convince a starving man to eat, and even though the house elf had his bedside did her due diligence, he only suck further into an emaciated version of the titan he had once been. He reminded Tommy of a bird, strong nose jutting out from the hem of his blankets, plume feathers for lashes and darting pupils beneath his purple eyelids.
“He’s getting worse,” Tommy deduced.
The house elf nodded, she didn’t speak, she might not have owned a tongue. The creatures that came across the Vitruvian were often missing all their parts, and Thimble was likely no exception.
The elf didn’t make a fuss as she squeezed a sponge into a bucket of ice water and rubbed it across Enoch’s forehead. Tommy was chilled from viewing the ice roll around in the bucket, but she also didn’t have a fever that was eating her away from the inside.
“Leave us, Thimble,” she said. “Don’t let him keep you from your sleep.”
Once the door had clicked behind the elf, Tommy pulled up the lounge chair from the corner of the room and relaxed her feet on the bed beside Enoch. He didn’t acknowledge her presence, but that was no surprise. He hadn’t done so in a fortnight; hadn’t left that bed in six months.
“You’re going to die and leave me here to clean up your mess aren’t you?” She asked, and the precipice of a sob rose in her throat. She swallowed it down. When was the last time she had cried? Maybe, when her sister died. It was difficult to decipher when the grief had come and reared, all those little deaths blurred together.
The hollow air avoided giving her an answer.
Tommy leaned forward, cupped Enoch’s hand, and composed her best threat. “If you go before I find it, I will follow you into hell and make you regret stealing me from my bed.”
Enoch wasn’t a father, wasn’t a brother, or even an uncle. He was hardly a caretaker. There were times that Tommy wished him dead with every ounce of her might, and times that he almost killed her for wishing it. Enoch wasn’t a lot of things, but most importantly, he was. He was the man that didn’t leave her on the river bank, the father that stopped whipping her when he found that her pain was mostly self inflicted anyway, the brother that kept the door to her room jammed when men entered the house, and the friend, that wasn’t much of a friend at all, but at least he had purchased her a piano for her fourteenth birthday. Not a simple piano, a flat back monstrosity with keys the color of onyx and rubies inlaid to reverberate the sound. Sometimes, when Tommy lay in bed and the ceiling began to close down on her, she would play the piano from twenty feet away. Every note crawled across her fingertips as the keys dropped at the mercy of an invisible thread of magic that tied her to the instrument. When she was especially stressed- it was a pipe organ, long timbering notes called out on high as if to coax martyrs from their crypts and call saint to mass.
Tommy played the piano at the bedside, a finger pressing into the worn pads of Enoch’s inner palm. Three doors down a pipe organ played.
“You’re a son of a bitch,” she said.
Atlan entered then, because when one of the bastards grieved it seemed to slip through the cracks in the floorboards and alert all of the others. He laid his large hand across her shoulder and sighed. They sat in silence; the Alchemist, the Architect and the Hierophant. Three hearts beat until the space grew confined with longing. Stars danced about through the windowpanes and the chandelier appeared to grow dimmer by the moment.
“Leave him,” Atlan huffed.
Tommy had the nerve to, but as she pulled away, the gentlest of squeezes pressed down on her white knuckle grip.