A Soulless Angel

As consciousness came back, he felt as if his brain was swimming; at first, he barely remembered anything, but after the first spark, the rest of his brain fired up. Fuck, his head….he couldn't even work out for himself whatever it was his head felt like. He woke up, blinking at the harsh lighting as he looked around, but his vision was so dazed he couldn't make much sense out of anything.

Blinking rapidly, he moved forward, and he quickly realised he was in some kind of cage; everywhere he moved, his fingers and his feet connected with something enclosing him. That snapped him back to full wakefulness, regardless of how tired he was.

His memories snapped back into place with a jolt; he had just realised his American family weren't that different from the other people he had known and had let him down or betrayed him over the years, and he had been preparing to leave.

He hadn't had any clear idea of what he would do, but he'd felt a glaring need to escape. To get out. Get out. Get out.

He had just finished the letter to his so-called relatives, who had proven themselves to be no different from the Dursleys, holding onto silly prejudices such as appearance, their mental state, and on and on it went without any care or regard of what others might have gone through in their lives, and he'd just about called for one of his own elves to get him out, to take him to Britain, when a pop startled him.

At first, he had assumed it was one of their House Elves, but when he turned to check, he'd had enough time to register the slightly regretful look on the House Elf's unfamiliar face before they chucked a bottle at him, and a blue smoke had wafted around him, but the potion was just a distraction while the House Elf just clicked their fingers, and then….

And that was it until he found himself here.

Harry stood up, using his hands to help him, and he realised he could reach just about his full height. The cage he was in was barred. Feeling an unfamiliar weight on his neck, he realised he was wearing a thick collar of some sort, made out of segmented pieces joined together.

Harry touched the bars.

And he yelped in pain. "Ow! Fucking hell!" Harry glared out of the bars, but there was nobody there.

A whimper answered him.

Harry's head whipped around, sending his long white hair flying. "What's that? Is someone there?"

He was in some kind of storage room lined by metal walls that reminded him of the tunnels he had seen on the London Underground, and he guessed this place was either underground, or somebody had gone to a lot of trouble to dress the place up; that seemed a bit farfetched to him, so he went with the first option. It made more sense.

There wasn't much to see; the room was quite large and there was a door. The only other interesting things in the room were the small number of cages identical to the one he was standing in, but what surprised and angered him was the sight of several children wearing dirty rags, but their faces were bruised.

Despite his anger, Harry was confused, wondering why there were children here, but then he caught sight of a young girl with silver-white blonde hair, and even through the bruises, he could recognise a Veela when he saw one. But before he could say a word to them and even try to think of a way he could speak to them, the door opened and two people stepped into the room, escorted by a soldier dressed in full combat fatigues; hearing the children whine and whimper with terror made him realise these thugs had assaulted them. More than once.

Harry tore his gaze away from the children, focusing on the two who'd just walked in. One was a woman with dirty blonde hair that was almost brown in colour, with a thin, attractive face but her lips were pinched, and there were lines of sorrow there set in a cool mask, but it was an act and even Harry could see that; the looks she was sending to the children were quick, too fast for him to suspect she didn't care. Instead if looked like she was regretting everything going on. She wasn't going to help them.

The man standing next to her didn't even need to broadcast his views. He was a big, brawny black man dressed in an immaculate military uniform; Harry didn't have a clue about ranks in muggle armies, but he'd heard something about stars in the US military, or something like that. His uniform jacket was covered with those weird bits of colour that were medals or something like that.

The man was glaring at him with unhidden hatred, despite them both never before meeting.

Harry broke the silence. "Who are you?" He decided the best thing to do would be to get some information. He couldn't see these two coming in here unless they were here to talk. "What do you want?"

The woman stared at him regretfully, her eyes darting to the cages again. "You were surprisingly easy for us to kidnap, Mr Potter," she said in an almost conversational voice, but it was clear she just wanted to break the tension. "I was hoping to kidnap a few more members of the Potter family of the branch living here since it would have gone a long way for the MACUSA to take us more seriously."

Harry was startled by her statement, but as he put more thought into it, he began to have a good idea who was in front of him; the soldiers at least, but not the woman.

"You're scourers, aren't you?"

"Is that what your filthy race calls us?" The soldier demanded angrily.

Harry dismissed him. "You are, aren't you? And it wasn't difficult to work out. How else would you be aware of the magical world? But how did you get your hands on potions and a House Elf?" He asked wonderingly as he looked between them, gauging them before he looked into their minds (he was more than a bit relieved his mind powers were still there, but at the same time whatever the collar was doing made it extremely hard for him to probe too deeply, so he couldn't do much) and turned his gaze to the woman. "You're a witch?"

The woman jumped. "How did you know that?"

"Oh, it's not difficult," Harry said airily as he decided to keep them talking so he could find out more about what was going on around him, and then try to think of a plan he could put in to get him and the kids out of here. "I looked into your minds, rode the surface thoughts. I know that he hates magicals," he pointed at the soldier, "and wants to wipe us out, and that includes all forms of magic around the world, including creatures, and then using what's left for something new. The magical world controls all knowledge of potions, and non-magical people could never hope to get hold of it in a million years. But it was the House Elf that kidnapped me that clinched it. Only a witch or wizard could get one. Plus, I skimmed your minds," he added with a smirk that barely masked the growing rage he was feeling.

"Damn freaks!" The soldier snarled.

"Freaks? You're the freak! You've kidnapped children, tortured them. Didn't your stupid group learn anything over the years?" Harry had had enough of the argument and he turned to the woman. "Why did you betray the magical world?"

The witch glared back at him before her lips trembled and she nearly lost all of her composure. Harry's eyes flickered over to the soldier, and he could see that despite how close he was standing to the woman, he made sure to keep his distance. He would even shuffle away, as if afraid he might catch something infectious.

He was a scourer all right, but he hadn't known their prejudice was that deep.

The witch began speaking - Harry turned to her at once, her head had been so full of incoherent thoughts despite one or two being clear enough for him to get a read on.

"My name's Abigail Walker," she said, and he realised with a start she had a British accent. "As I grew up, weird things happened around me. My parents and siblings loved me at first, but that all changed after my seventh birthday when one of my cousins wrecked my party, and he was thrown across the room. When that happened, many suspected I did it, and then my parents and siblings started hating me, and they weren't the only ones," she took a deep breath as she opened her mouth again, and then quickly closed it just as fast, and he had the feeling she had been about to tell him more about her childhood, but then she had just changed her mind. "Then I got my letter to a school for magic."

"Let me guess, Hogwarts?"

"Yes," Abigail nodded. "After that, my parents changed even more once they heard what it was; if they hadn't been even more convinced I was possessed by the Devil himself, they were after that."

She took a deep breath that shuddered, and Harry wondered if she had gone through what he had when he was younger. The Dursleys had subjected him to three exorcisms as he had grown older, particularly when he was 5, 6, and 8. As he'd turned 5, his magic had begun reacting violently to what the Dursleys had been doing, but its was after his eighth birthday his magical explosions had begun getting out of control. The Dursleys had had more than enough by those points, and they would increase their abuse.

And then they would bring out an exorcism.

Every time it happened, Harry would be scared virtually to death. He knew that Tom Riddle had been subjected to it as well, humiliated by it as well, and he wasn't surprised other muggles had done the same to their own children. What made it all worse was that the magical world could have gotten the children out of the muggle world, and brought into the comparative safety of the wizarding world. If that happened, then nobody would have to be subjected to that kind of terror.

Harry actually considered telling her he had been where she had been, but he decided against it; with the soldier there, visibly smirking at the thought of exorcisms being brought against innocent children who possessed magic, the last thing he wanted to do was give these bastards another weapon.

"After my first year at Hogwarts," she wore a look of disgust as she said the name of the school, "my parents moved away, leaving a message they would never have anything to do with the freak ever again. I was devastated. I moved in with a friend, a fellow muggle-born, and they became my family. For the next 6 years, I did my best at school while You-Know-Know rose to power, attracting followers. I married the guy who saved me from the streets, and we were happy, content to just be left alone."

"What happened?" Harry asked.

Walker looked down. "My family were murdered, and the Dark Mark had been conjured overhead. The state of their bodies…," she choked and kept looking down at the floor. "We never did anything to them, Potter. We had stayed out of the war, while your parents joined in the fighting. I never registered once on Dumbledore's radar, I was never a favourite, you see. I reported the murders to the Ministry, well the aurors turned up, hours late, can you believe that?"

Harry could, but then his views on the British Ministry weren't favourable. "What did you do?" He asked, knowing that that was just not enough for this woman to come all the way out here, and seek out a bunch of radical magic haters.

"The Ministry did nothing about my family's murders. They didn't care about muggle-borns, or their families. Did you know that sometimes aurors would be sent to harass muggle-borns, asking them questions that were extremely demeaning? They even demanded to know if we had been branded with that filthy mark. Sometimes, I often asked myself if they were Death Eaters themselves!"

Harry knew the answer to that was a big fat yes. Thanks to being in Voldemort's mind, and sucking up the memories and knowledge of the Death Eaters, he knew one of the favoured tactics of the Death Eaters was to cause as many problems as possible for the muggle-borns. Sometimes they would pose as aurors, hit wizards, and the like, and go out and cause as much damage as possible. It was all calculated and directed to spread suspicion among the muggle-borns.

Harry decided to be honest. "Some of them were," he caught her look of surprise, and explained, "The Death Eaters didn't just raid the muggle-borns, kidnap them or rape them. They did everything they could to harass them. So, what did you do next? Is that when you came here?"

He suspected that wasn't the case.

"No. That wasn't until later. After the funeral, which was crashed by another bunch of aurors and investigators, I decided I'd had enough; I joined a group of muggle-borns, who'd had enough of the Ministry, Dumbledore, and the Death Eaters. We did a lot of good, and I thought it was worth it at first, but then Dumbledore led the charge against us, and he broke us up. I was one of the few to escape while the others were sent to Azkaban, for the murders of 'upstanding citizens,'" Abigail's voice rose to a deafening scream. "Can you believe that?!" She hollered.

Harry barely managed to avoid flinching at the volume, the kids whimpered. "Oh, I can; I know enough of Dumbledore's methods to know he always cared more for the victims than the ones who sought justice. So what happened then?"

Abigail was silent for the moment. "I decided that enough was enough. I realised that the magical world, that magic itself, was evil, pure evil. I vanished. I looked into ways I could get my revenge, and after studying the MACUSA and its history, I realised what I could do," she replied after taking a moment to compose herself. "I came here, and I found the scourers' descendants, and after showing them proof of my good faith, they let me become a part of their organisation. And with them, I came up with a plan to destroy the magical world forever."

Harry was sure it wasn't that easy. The scourers were the most hated organisation the MACUSA knew from what he'd learnt, and finding them would likely be next to impossible.

But wizards and witches could barely function that well in the non-magical world, but people like Abigail and Harry, could easily find their way around, but Harry was unsure if he could have found the scourers.

Looking at events from her point of view, Harry knew he would have done anything, everything, to get revenge on the magical world if that happened to him, but at the same time, a part of him, the part that wanted nothing more than to scream "FUCK IT" just wanted to grab his wands, and slaughter everyone in St Mungo's and in Hogwarts.

Somehow, he had the feeling there were other muggle-borns who would have done something similar, but he wondered if they would be stupid enough to trust the scourers when it was clear that Walker was more tolerated than liked.

"So why did you kidnap these kids? They're just children," Harry said.

Abigail Walker had her mouth open, but before a sound could even be uttered out of her mouth, Sullivan spoke up. "They're freaks, and they're part of the plan," he said.

Harry had recognised the type of person Sullivan was within the first few minutes of meeting him; her was a typical bigot, but because of his military background, he was far more dangerous than some old woman like the old bitch who'd abused Credence Barebone. He also disliked magic, and he only just tolerated the witch in his presence.

Sometimes she would get looks thrown her way, looks of distrust, dislike, and suspicion. Harry wondered if Abigail had noticed, and he guessed she would have been foolish not to have noticed, but the thing was…sometimes people did miss things like that.

Why did he get the impression Sullivan was going to murder her sooner or later?

"You're torturing them. You've kidnapped them, and you're torturing them. I don't get it, if you wanted to get to the magical world, you could have shown them the entrances to places like hospitals, and schools, so why haven't you?" Harry's voice was laced with suspicion although he prayed it never occurred to Sullivan to demand similar answers from Abigail, never mind him. While he personally didn't care about the magical world, he just lacked the mental energy to really be a threat.

In the end, what good would it bring?

"The scourers have tried that before," Walker told him, and Harry knew what she was saying. "While they have tried to find some way of replicating the near success in the 1780s, they've always failed, and while they….did," Abigail Walker stressed the word and drawled it out with a sharp look of disdain towards Sullivan and his men, which showed that they had tried to get answers from the witch willingly putting her life on the line to join and work with them, "try to…persuade me to give up many locations, but I had something better in mind. Why expose the magical world only to have your memories erased than by doing something else?"

And then it came to him.

"You're going to reveal the magic these kids have?" Harry whispered.

"More than that, we're trying to make obscurials; by releasing them, showing them all on live TV, imagine the outcry while we expose the locations of the magical world?" Sullivan's voice was full of fanatical satisfaction; the glimmer in his eyes was shared by his men, right behind him.