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Power Plays Chapter 35
🕑 Added 2024-05-08 15:59:01 +0000 UTC“Place Cachée is not only a marketplace or a community for us, it is a symbol of our greatness!” Liliane Roche, the French Minister for Magic, announced loudly to the assembled mourners, dignitaries, and Aurors in the middle of Place Cachée.
The main street had been the first area to be cleaned up from the Death Eater attack, and while there was still much work to be done towards the outskirts of the magical settlement, it was impressive just how quickly they’d managed to repair Place Cachée into its former splendour. It was far faster than the British Ministry would have been able to do, although that was in part due to the fact that the French Ministry hadn’t been fragmented by war since Grindelwald’s time.
“The attack on it was devastating, yes,” Liliane said with just the right amount of sadness in her eyes. But then her face shifted back to its resolute expression that had been on it since she began her speech. “But we have overcome worse before. We showed our resiliency back when the Dark Lord Grindelwald plagued our shores, and we will show resiliency again in the face of these new miscreants who’ve taken root in our country. We will not show fear against those who have wronged us; we will show courage and the strongest determination to put a stop to their evil deeds once and for all!”
Harry was quite impressed with how easily she worked the crowd. Over two-hundred chairs were ordered in twenty neat rows of ten, split right down the middle by a wide aisle that they’d walked down to get to the stage that’d been erected here. Select members of the families of the victims made up the first four rows, though they were interspersed with a few important government officials. Behind them were the officials deemed less important, followed by members of the press, shopkeepers here in Place Cachée, and pre-screened members of the public. It was all so meticulously organised, and Harry recognised it for what it was: pandering.
You see, when he first met Liliane, he didn’t see genuine sympathy for the victims in her eyes. From the reserved expression on Sebastian’s face, Harry could see that the man wasn’t a big fan of her either. She made a big show about shaking Harry’s hand right in view of a few flashing cameras and having a few not-so-private moments with the grieving families before she finally made her way up to the stage. Throughout it all, Harry watched her. And all he saw was her brain doing mental calculations of how she could get the most amount of political capital out of all of this.
Harry could almost respect her killer instinct for politics. She knew what she was doing, and almost everyone was buying it up. But what he couldn’t stand was someone who didn’t actually seem to care about victims.
Ever since he started working towards improving the British Ministry, victims of the Death Eaters’ cruelties had always been at the forefront of his mind. The pure-blood families who continued to hoard dark artefacts and maintain nefarious connections were a cancer on the wizarding world that would only bring pain and suffering for the masses down the line. He wanted to stop them and prevent any other mass uprisings by those who sought to subjugate others.
No one deserved to grow up without parents who were lost to political violence.
Harry could feel an emotional connection with victims of tragedies, and that was partly how he excused his political machinations. When he took down Dawlish, he did so for the good of the British public.
He could see that Liliane didn’t truly care about the French public; she only cared about staying in power and making sure that everyone saw her as the benevolent, strong leader she portrayed herself as.
“The pain that these terrorists caused can never be forgotten, and it is my sincere regret that we weren’t able to stop them before this attack,” Liliane said, staring directly into the eyes of each and every family member of the victims. “But rest assured that our Aurors are on the case. In conjunction with the help of the great hero Harry Potter, who defeated the Dark Lord Voldemort and his followers back in Britain many times over, Head Auror Sebastian Delacour will see to it that justice will be done!”
A cheer went up in the crowd, but Harry was more focused on the angry looks sent his way. It was readily apparent from the moment he’d arrived here before the memorial that quite a few people blamed him for all of this. He understood it to a degree. The Death Eaters were born in Britain, and Harry was portrayed as the man who was responsible for defeating them. But he didn’t do a good enough job to prevent a tragedy like this.
“Brutal, isn’t it?” Senior Auror Elwyn murmured in his ear. “So many dead, and they hate us for it.”
Harry simply nodded.
Liliane stepped down from the podium and looked around at everyone on the stage. Several senior government officials were standing on her right while Sebastian, Harry, and a few of their Senior Aurors were on her left. She began by shaking hands with her deputies and other government officials before coming over to the Aurors.
“Sebastian,” she smiled as she shook the man’s hand. Her demeanour was warm, but her eyes were cold.
“Liliane,” he replied similarly.
She released his hand like it burned her and stepped over to Harry. Though she had a kind smile on her lips, it was clear that she was taking measure of him.
“Head Auror Potter,” she greeted him. “I do hope that you’ll manage to put a stop to these attacks soon.”
“As do I,” Harry shook her hand. Regardless of his opinions on the woman, his public appearance meant quite a bit. If he wanted to maintain his good standing back in Britain, he needed to show that he was working well with the French Ministry. “I understand that Sebastian and his Aurors have managed to come up with a few leads after interrogating the captured Death Eaters.”
“Yes, he has,” Liliane replied as her smile became tight. She was a pretty-enough woman who looked to be in her late forties, but her skin looked too stretched across her face whenever she thought about something distasteful. “I wish you two the best of luck.”
Cameras flashed again a moment before Liliane walked away. A swarm of her deputies rushed to her side and guided her down into the crowd to go speak to the families again.
“Walk with me,” Sebastian said in a clipped tone to Harry as he started for the edge of the stage.
“Keep an eye on things around here and then head back to the Ministry when it’s all done,” Harry ordered Elwyn. “Check to see if Zacharias has anything actionable for us. He’s said that the French Aurors have been polite enough to him, but there’s still some lingering tension over us being brought here to help out. Make sure that things stay peaceful, yeah?”
“You’ve got it, boss,” Elwyn said with a cheeky salute before he hopped off the stage and went around to meet up with a few of the French Aurors on the scene.
Harry trailed after Sebastian, who had started walking down the main street of Place Cachée away from the crowd. Harry caught up to the man quickly. He had a dark look across his face as they rounded a bend and ended up further down where reconstruction was still ongoing. Buildings showed signs of the battle that had taken place with windows still being smashed and scorch marks littering the beautiful exterior walls. There were a few witches and wizards walking about with their wands drawn, steadily repairing the damage that’d been done.
“I have something serious to talk to you about, Harry,” Sebastian said quietly.
For a second, Harry’s heart pounded in his chest as he wondered if Sebastian had found out about him and Gabrielle. She’d been so sore from their marathon of fucking the other night that she actually called in sick to work the day after. She was back to work the last few days, and she’d been bubbly and ecstatic the entire time. It was a noticeable shift in her behaviour that a few people had commented on.
“Go on then,” Harry said to the man, wanting to get it over with quickly.
Sebastian eyed him cautiously. “It’s about who’s behind the attack.”
Harry’s heart returned to its normal beat as his mind shifted back into Auror mode. “You said yesterday that the interrogations bore fruit.”
The morning after Harry spent the night at Chateau Delacour, Sebastian had returned for a quick breakfast and shower before heading out to work. All he’d said then was that one of the Death Eaters had cracked and now they had something to go off of, but it was going to take a day or two for more research to be done before they could commit to anything.
Sebastian nodded gravely. “I’m telling you this out of respect for who you are, and I hope that you can understand the need for secrecy in this matter before we progress any further.”
“Of course, Sebastian,” Harry agreed readily. He understood the need to keep things private between Aurors before the rest of the Ministry got involved. It wouldn’t be the first time that he’d kept things hidden like this.
“One of the men we interrogated knew more than the rest,” Sebastian began. “He accidentally overheard a bit of information back at one of their bases when they were getting ready for the raid. By now, it’s clear that pure-bloods were targeted disproportionately in the attack, and several of them had some of their blood drained from their bodies. We knew it wasn’t vampires who did the attack, so the question remained as to why the Death Eaters took the blood.”
Sebastian sucked in a deep breath and glanced around again. He looked more serious than Harry had ever seen the man look before.
“My younger brother was a renowned alchemist. Apprenticed under Nicholas Flamel himself before he got arrested for illegally experimenting on human subjects without government approval. He was playing with dangerous stuff. Necromancy, transmutation, seeking immortality. What he did to those people… immoral, and I still bear the guilt of not realising what he was getting up to sooner. His prison sentence ended a little under a decade ago, and he just vanished. No one saw or heard from him ever since. Until now.”
Harry’s eyes widened. Sebastian’s brother, Gabrielle and Fleur’s uncle, was the one behind this attack.
“The Death Eater saw my brother, Emile, working with Cyrus Greengrass on something,” Sebastian told Harry with a firm look. “They had the blood and feathers of a Thunderbird in their possession, along with a collection of jars with who knows what in them. If my brother is involved in this, then something seriously bad is going to happen. There’s a million different things he can do with blood; he can control people like puppets with it, use it to spread some magically-resistant diseases, create monstrous blood creatures that are the things of nightmares. I shudder to think what he’s capable of doing, and we need to stop him before it’s too late.”
Harry took a moment to process all of this information. He understood why Sebastian told this to him in confidence. People could be terribly fickle. He and Liliane didn’t seem to be on the greatest terms, and if everyone found out that Sebastian’s brother was behind these attacks, then the public outcry might be enough to force him out of his position. Harry hadn’t seen Sebastian in action yet, but from everything he’d heard, he was a damn fine Auror. It’d be a shame to lose him from this case.
“Just tell me what you need me to do,” Harry told the man sincerely.
“For now, nothing regarding Emile,” Sebastian sighed. “My Aurors are already scouting out some of the Death Eater bases that we managed to uncover from our interrogations, and I’d be happy to pass over a few locations to your team to pursue as well. I just wanted you to know about Emile in case…”
“In case I found out myself,” Harry finished for him.
“Exactly,” Sebastian said, looking pained to have to admit that. “I don’t plan on keeping this a secret forever—it’ll get out eventually once we stop him—but I don’t need any more grief from the higher ups at the Ministry right now.”
It seemed that no matter where Harry went, bureaucracy was still the enemy of hardworking Aurors.
“No one will hear it from me,” Harry assured him. “I’ll keep my Aurors quiet about it too if they figure anything out on their own. We’re in this together, Sebastian, and I want to see it through to the end with you.”
“You don’t know how relieved I am to hear that,” Sebastian said with a weak smile. “Now, why don’t we get back to the Ministry. There’s enough work for all of our Aurors to stay busy for quite a while.”
PAGE BREAK
The Provence countryside was just as beautiful as Harry had been led to believe. Muggle towns littered the southern area of France while smaller magical communities dotted the landscape in between them. The rolling hills and mountains in the distance provided the perfect backdrop for a stakeout mission.
Per Sebastian’s intelligence, Harry was out here watching an alleged Death Eater safe house. The captured Death Eater who’d informed Sebastian about Emile also told him about several private locations around France that were used as meeting points for the Death Eaters. Some had magical artefacts stored within, others were filled with beds so that the Death Eaters could have a place to rest and relax.
Sebastian had coordinated multiple stakeouts between his Aurors and Harry’s. With little to do until they had a concrete plan to take down one of these safe houses, Harry assigned one of the stakeout jobs to himself.
And his new, temporary partner.
“I’m bored,” Gabrielle whinged as she rolled over onto her back. “Can’t we use a cushioning charm on the ground at least?”
“You know we can’t,” Harry replied as he glanced away from the Omnioculars in his hands. He had them trained on the front entrance to the large barn that sat across the long field in front of them. Him and Gabrielle had set up on this hillside well out of sight from the barn two days ago now, and there hadn’t been a single person coming to or going from that barn in all that time. “If they have wards—”
“Yeah, yeah, they’ll pick up on any spells we cast,” Gabrielle grumbled. “Stupid magic.”
Harry sighed. He wished they could use a cushioning charm too, but he just couldn’t risk it. He could sense the wards around that barn, but they were so hastily erected that several of the layers had become tangled together. It was impossible to discern what they were comprised of unless he got a look at the ward scheme or some other sign of what at least one of the layers did—if he knew that, it’d be far easier to uncover what the other layers did. Until they knew that there weren’t any spellcasting-detection wards on the surrounding area, they were stuck to using pre-existing magical objects to help in their stakeout.
“Don’t be so glum,” Harry tried to cheer her up a bit. “For my first couple years as an Auror, I was doing stakeouts almost every week. They’re not that bad.”
“They are when you’re stuck lying on the hard ground,” Gabrielle complained. She rolled over again along the slanted hillside until she bumped against Harry. “You know, I have an idea how we can help pass the time.”
Her hand brushed his crotch, making her intentions clear.
“We need to stay on task,” Harry said as he shifted away from her. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to have sex with her, it was just that right now was a horrible time for it. This was a crucial point in their case. If they managed to find any evidence of a congregation of Death Eaters somewhere, then they’d finally get a chance to be proactive rather than just reacting to the latest Death Eater attack.
“Fine,” Gabrielle huffed. She scooted back up to the crest of the hill and put her own set of Omnioculars up to her eyes.
Hours passed. They did little except watch and trade off on taking breaks. Gabrielle had brought food from them from her house, so they had a lovely spread to enjoy—though, Harry had nixed the bottle of wine that Gabrielle tried to convince him to share with her.
By the time the sun was beginning to set, Harry was sore down to his bones and ready to turn in for the night.
“East side,” Gabrielle said softly.
Harry swung his Omnioculars over and enhanced the zoom to spot a lone figure sporting a black cloak walking suspiciously down the dirt road that led from the town down to this farm. The person was walking awkwardly and checking over their shoulder a few times as they headed to the barn.
A new recruit, most likely, Harry assumed. Given the fact that the only Death Eaters that made it out of Britain were the scraps of the once powerful organisation, they didn’t exactly have their best and brightest to train new recruits on how to not look suspicious.
As the figure neared the door, a gust of wind made their cloak billow outward. It was clearly a man beneath that cloak. He had a short, brown goatee and some very fine clothes on underneath his cloak. Possibly a pure-blood from a wealthy family, but Harry couldn’t say for certain.
When he walked up to the barn door, it swung open gently at his touch. There was a faint, shimmering, translucent light that washed over him as he stepped through the threshold. Then, the door closed smoothly behind him.
Harry quickly hit a button on the side of Omnioculars that saves the last minute of recording. There was a faint hum before a gentle chime sounded, confirming that the recording had been saved. Gabrielle did the same before looking up at him.
“I recognised his cloak,” she told Harry as she shuffled over with her Omnioculars in hand. “Here, watch.”
She activated the replay function and watched through the two metal tubes until she got to the right spot. She paused right in time and then passed them over to Harry.
When he brought the Omnioculars up to his eyes, he could see the man from a close-up perspective. His frame was clearly defined, as were the lines of his face.
“There’s a little stitching on the bottom right side of his cloak there,” Gabrielle said. “Do you see it?”
Harry focused his vision on the cloak that had been flapping in the wind. In this frozen shot, he could just barely make out the hem of it as it billowed outward. There were two small golden letters stitched into the dark fabric: MF.
“It’s from Madam Floquet’s Enchantment Boutique,” Gabrielle exclaimed excitedly. “They keep tight records on everyone who buys anything from their shop since some of their work is on Goblin-made products or things that could be considered dangerous in the wrong hands. They’ll have a record of anyone who bought an enchanted cloak from their shop from the past couple centuries at least!”
“Brilliant!” Harry grinned. He was glad he’d taken Gabrielle along after all. He might have spotted this too, but he still would have needed someone else to explain what it meant.
As Gabrielle basked in the glow of finding a lead, Harry scrolled through the rest of the video again. He was specifically interested in the ward scheme. Thankfully, he was able to slow down the video enough that he could just barely parse the flicker of colour that happened when the man passed through the light into the barn, but he didn’t like what he saw one bit.
“There’s an explosive hex woven into the wards,” Harry said aloud. That could mean one of two things: either someone who wasn’t allowed past the wards would be struck by an explosive hex or the entire building was rigged to explode.
“Want to go break it down?” Gabrielle asked.
Harry shook his head. “No,” he answered. “You need to get back to the Ministry and write up a report on what we found, and then pass that along to your dad.”
“There’s no way I’m leaving you to have all the fun without me,” Gabrielle protested.
“I’m not doing anything else here tonight,” Harry said. “I’m going back to England for a couple of days to check in on the Auror Department there and to spend some time with Daphne.”
Gabrielle pouted at that, but Harry just ignored her. He knew that she was annoyed that their one night of incredible sex hadn’t been enough to make him commit to her the way she wanted, but he’d made it clear to her that he wasn’t going to leave Daphne for anyone.
Perhaps he should bring Gabrielle along with him and let Daphne put her in her place. The idea was amusing, but Harry honestly just wanted to have a peaceful moment or two with his girlfriend without anyone else disturbing them. Maybe after this was all over though…
