Chapter Thirty-Five: I Kissed Thee Ere I Killed Thee

At five minutes to eight, Lily slid through the gates to Malfoy Manor, wrapped in a long black cloak that swirled around her ankles. Her wand was already in her hand; its tip glowed with a faint white-blue radiance as she waited for James and Sirius to arrive.

She had not left her room for the rest of the day. Bellatrix had shown up after dinner to berate her for not eating, bringing with her both a plate of chicken and yet more advice on how to ensure tonight's mission went well. Lily had nodded dutifully as she played with her food. Her appetite had utterly deserted her.

Several minutes later, a pair of tall figures pushed their way through the heavy gates, muffled in hooded dark cloaks that obscured their faces. Lily automatically stepped backwards.

"James?" she said sharply. "Sirius?" Her wand raised, trying to penetrate the shadows that concealed them.

"It's us," James said. He threw his hood back with a toss of his head.

Lily turned her glare to the other figure. There was an obstinate pause, before Sirius too pushed the hood away. The ivory paleness of his skin was almost luminescent in the night-time, and with a glance upwards she realised that it was a full moon tonight. She hoped Remus was alright; she had not seen him since he had left with Fenrir Greyback last night.

"Right, this is the spot," Sirius said. From beneath the folds of his cloak his hand snaked out, clutching a piece of paper. She squinted at it. The photograph – in black-and-white – was of a traditional English farmhouse, complete with thatched roof, surrounded by rolling countryside. There was nobody in the picture: were it not for the gentle waving motion of the grass, she would have thought it a Muggle photograph.

"We'll be Apparating here," Sirius said. "Think you can make it without Splinching yourself, cousin?"

"I'll be fine," she said, though uneasiness was creeping up her limbs. She had never before tried Apparating to a place she had not physically been, though it was certainly possible.

"In that case, let's go," James said. His voice was different somehow: darker, cooler, a touch of detachment in the drawl. He did not wait for acknowledgement from them, but turned and vanished into the night.

"What's gotten into him?" Lily said, staring after him.

Sirius shrugged loosely. "Do you really think you'll come out of tonight the same person?" he asked. It was said as though he considered it an answer to her question, not the random aside it sounded like, and Lily was still chewing over his meaning as she entered the suffocating chasm of Apparition beneath him.

"Ouch!"

She stumbled as her feet landed on solid ground. A hand steadied her, gripping her arm tightly.

"Lily?" James said sharply. "Are you alright?"

"I'm fine," she said. She shook her head to rid it of a strange high-pitched ringing sound that had taken up residence inside it. "Just…"

They both looked down at her hand. In the bright moonlight, it was apparent that the nail of her left index finger had vanished, leaving a bloody gap in its place. She winced at the sight.

"Ugh, I knew this would happen…"

Sirius prowled up. "You'll be fine," he said, giving it a dismissive glance. "We've had worse just tussling with Moony, haven't we, Prongs?"

Ignoring him, James took out his wand and tapped her finger lightly. There was a sudden shot of heightened pain as a new sheet of nail grew over the missing chunk. Then, nothing.

"Thank you," Lily said quietly, glancing up at him through her lashes. His hood was still down. The patrician lines of his face were set and remote, but banked fire glittered in the low amber of his eyes, as though his emotions were barely under leash. Her lungs stopped working.

"You're welcome," he returned, voice jagged.

Sirius sighed loudly. "If you two are done," he said with exaggerated patience, "our target is waiting."

Lily stepped away from James and immediately felt as though she could breathe again. Drawing in lungfuls of cold, clean air, untainted by James's faintly smoky scent, she took in her first sight of Caradoc Dearborn's house.

The Dearborns' ancestral home looked as though it had been there for millennia, since the time of the Anglo-Saxons perhaps, a grizzled behemoth who bore its age on its skin. The grey stone walls of the farmhouse were marked with black scabs. They were standing perhaps fifty feet from it, atop a raised mound of ground that could perhaps have been described as a hill. Yellow light spilled out from one of the simple glass windows.

"There he is," Sirius said. His voice was soft as silk. "He should be alone. But we'll have to wait and check."

Casting a Cushioning Charm onto the mown grass beneath her, Lily sank down cross-legged onto it, arranging her cloak into folds that kept out the worst of the cold. She foresaw a long wait. After several moments, James joined her, his knee jostling against hers for space as he settled beside her. She debated pulling back, but the press of contact was a welcome point of warmth. She let it be.

"How long will we wait?" she whispered.

"An hour should do," he murmured back. "I don't expect he'll be receiving visitors after nine at night. We'll spend the hour after that disabling any protective charms he has on the place. Then… we're in."

"In," she echoed.

She had felt ill at the thought that morning, and all the afternoon, but it was like the Quidditch try-outs; the moment the time came for decisive action, her roiling doubts drained away, leaving her feeling hollow and slightly tired. Almost without thought her head dropped onto James's shoulder. He stiffened under her in shock for a moment before relaxing into the touch, his muscles loosening.

One arm carefully swept around her body to drape his cloak over her. She hummed at the additional layer of warmth. His arm too was as hot as a brand, pressing against her back, sending trails of electricity up and down her spine.

The next hour passed in a daze. They did not speak, but sat together in silence; out of the corner of her eye Lily saw the figure of Sirius pacing up and down like a caged tiger, circling them restlessly. He had at first eyed their positions with an oddly amused twist to his lips before backing away.

Though a light went on in a different part of the cottage, nobody went in or out. An interminable length of time later James stirred against Lily's body.

"Time to get closer, l – Lily," he said.

"Huh?"

She blinked the encroaching sleep away from her eyes, sitting up away from James with an odd sense of loss. There had been something strange and perfect about the last hour: sitting like this, almost on him, in silence, feeling the heat of his body and beat of his heart. She had nearly gone straight to sleep.

"Yes, of course," she said. "Let's get closer." She levered herself to her feet and hesitated for a moment before offering him her hand. He used it to pull himself up, though she suspected he had held it more for the touch than out of necessity; there had been no strain on her arm as he rose. Still holding her hand, he led her to where Sirius was standing motionless a little way down the hill.

"Come on, Padfoot," James said as they passed him. "We're going down, it's close on nine."

Sirius fell into step beside them wordlessly. The almost complete, deadening silence of the Somerset seemed to have affected him too. His eyes were distant as they scanned the farmhouse, and he said nothing when he saw their joined hands, though one eyebrow quirked upwards in sardonic amusement.

Lily felt the first of the protective spells when they were still a good thirty feet away from the cottage. She hissed as a thread of magic twined itself around her ankles, focussed on making her lose her balance.

"Here's one," she said. She glanced at Sirius, watching her with keen interest. It was time to start making herself useful. "I can disable it."

She was forced to drop James's hand and stepped backwards, away from them both, lifting her wand as she went. The hex was deceptively simple: it unravelled easily when she concentrated her magic on it, but she only noticed at the last moment what one of its crucial functions was. She gasped and flicked her wand in a short, vicious burst.

The part of the spell that would have alerted Dearborn to their presence was arrested in mid-flight. Her lips moving furiously, Lily mouthed a counter-spell. Slowly, grudgingly, the trip hex coiled away from the cottage's inhabitant and faded into oblivion.

Only then could Lily give her attention back to her companions. "It's gone," she said tightly. The nearness of that miss had made sweat prickle along her back. "There will be more, I'm sure, but that's one down."

Sirius was already working on the next one, an early-warning jinx that froze intruders in their tracks. Unlike her, the spell did not seem to be giving him any trouble; his arrogant face was almost bored as he dissipated the spell with lazy swipes.

Lily gritted her teeth. Show-off.

Her irritation fuelled her through the next round of spell disablements, and it was only once she was assured that there were no more curses left that she allowed herself to relax slightly. They were now almost at the cottage's front door – whitewashed wood with an otter's head doorknocker.

"We can't have him making a run for it," Sirius said as they hovered there. "Let me take care of it…"

He closed his eyes. Lily felt a slow wave of magic roll over her and recognised it: a fencing-in charm, one that would stop the inhabitants within its radius from escaping.

"You didn't do anything," she threw at James. "I take it you aren't just here for decoration?"

He shrugged, smirking. "Well, you know Charms isn't my strong point," he said. "I'd just get in the way. But I do have my strong points…"

"Stop flirting and get us in, Prongs," Sirius said languorously. What had been for her a gruelling half-hour of magic casting had left him looking as though he were on the verge of going to bed. His crystal-grey eyes were half-lidded as he examined the farmhouse's porch, and he was twirling his wand carelessly between his long thin fingers.

James rolled his eyes at him, then took aim at the door.

"Reducto!"

The explosion of power that rocked their corner of countryside was unlike almost anything Lily had ever known. Gasping under the wave of pure magic, she watched in stunned horror as the door simply exploded, raining sand-fine particles of wood down onto the three of them. She had seen James cast curses in their duel in the Library, but this – this was something else. Her wide-eyed gaze swung to him.

"What on earth –"

"Another time, Lily-my-lily," he said. Gently he used the tip of his wand to push her hanging jaw upwards. "Right now, we've a job to do."

She shook herself. "Yes, yes, of course…"

They followed Sirius as he picked his way, cat-delicate, through the gaping hole where the door had been.

"Where's Dearborn?" she muttered to him out of the corner of her mouth. "He'd have to be dead already not to hear this… Argh!"

A scream bolted from her as a man burst out at them from behind the closed door at the end of the passageway. Caradoc Dearborn, it seemed, was very much alive.

He was a tall barrel-chested man in perhaps his thirties or forties, with a long russet-brown beard that trailed down his front and hawkish yellow eyes in a tanned face. His features twisted in rage as he brandished his wand at them.

"Petrificus totalus!"

Lily dodged on instinct. She needn't have bothered; Sirius swiped at the burst of light with his own wand, sending it careening into a nearby vase, which shattered on impact. The ceramic rang painfully as the shards dropped to the floor.

Lily found that she was panting.

"Dearborn," James drawled, sauntering forward to stand beside Sirius. She did not know if it were deliberate or not, but his lithe frame blocked her from the man's view. "Is this usually how you welcome your guests?"

"It's how I welcome Death Eater scum," he snarled. His voice was a deep, bearlike rasp. "I suppose it was only a matter of time, but I won't go down easy, boy. Expelliarmus!"

Her wand wanted to jerk itself out of her hand, but the spell had not been directed at her, and she was able to force away the impulse by retaining a firm grip on it. A light haze of pinkish-red seemed to have descended over Lily's vision. Everything was painfully sharp: the voices pierced through her eardrums like bells, and her eyes ached as she strained not to blink ten times in rapid succession. She shouldered forward to stand between James and Sirius. As much as the most inmost, cowardly part of her wanted to hide away behind them, this entire night was supposed to be her show. Sirius would be telling tales to the Dark Lord, and she owed it to herself to make sure they were good ones.

Dearborn had not noticed her before; his impossibly golden eyes narrowed as he took her in.

"You're a new one," he said gruffly.

"My name is Delilah Black," she said quietly.

He did not know her, but he certainly knew of her family, and his expression hardened.

"Flagrante! Stupefy! Stupefy!"

His wand was discharging spells like bullets. Lily ducked as the fire spell flew over her head, so close she could feel its heat singing her hair, while James and Sirius scattered.

"Protego!" she choked through a throat that seemed to have swollen to twice its normal size.

The shield charm diverted one of the Stunning Spells. Lily straightened up, heaving, to find that Dearborn had not wasted the breathing room conferred by his barrage of spells. He was weaving some sort of complicated protective enchantment at furious speed, his wand-tip leaving sparks of blue fire as it sailed through the air.

James rolled to his feet. He was bleeding sluggishly where he had grazed his head escaping the other Stunning Spell, but his face was alight with excitement.

"Sectumsepra!"

Slashes of scarlet appeared over his arms. Dearborn roared in pain. While his attention was distracted, Sirius struck.

"Incarcero!"

Chains rattled heavily out of his wand as they slithered to where Dearborn stood. He severed them viciously, but more and more came, sliding up and over his body as though alive. Finally he was left standing there and gasping for breath as they tightened mercilessly over his limbs.

The outcome of the duel had never been in doubt; it would have taken a remarkable wizard indeed to withstand odds of three against one. Yet Lily found that she had to lean against a nearby wall for support as she recovered in the aftermath. Her palms were slick with sweat, and she found with distant surprise that a bruise was already blossoming over her knee.

"Thank you, that was just the warmup we needed," Sirius said brightly. His hair was disordered, and there were flags of red colour high in his cheeks, but otherwise there was not a scratch on him.

"I'll tell you nothing," the man snarled. "You might as well kill me now, for I'll be no use to you."

With a strangled sound, he sank to the ground, finally overcome by the tightness of the chains. His wand dropped uselessly from his hand and was snagged up by Sirius.

"Permit me to relieve your mind," James said easily. "We have no intention of killing you. In fact, we've specific orders not to."

"More's the pity for you," Sirius tacked on. "There's many a man has begged us for death, and we aren't usually churlish enough not to oblige them."

The two boys were standing grinning down at him, triumph glowing in their faces, an almost feral light in their eyes. Lily slid silently down the floor to sit cross-legged. They seemed to have forgotten her presence for the moment, and that was just the way she liked it. Though she could not totally stifle the part of her that hummed with satisfaction at a job successfully done, the majority of her was concentrating on settling her uncomfortably fluttering stomach. She could not, would not, be sick –

"Crucio!"

Lily's yelp of shock was covered by Dearborn's scream. He threw himself onto his back, wriggling futilely, mouth open in a rictus of pain. Sirius eyed him with clinical interest. His wand was outstretched, flicking lazily, as though to follow the man's writhing movements across the floor.

Lily scrambled to her feet, whether to help Sirius or stop him even she did not know, but was stopped by a hard body stepping close into hers. She looked up. James still looked half-wild, threads away from snapping, but his finger was soft as he lifted it to rest lightly against her lips.

"Don't get involved," he breathed. "Not if you don't want Sirius to remember you're here. Leave it to us."

She nodded once, jerkily. He gave her a smile completely at odds with the savage gleam in his eyes before turning back to the tableau in front of them.

Lily closed her eyes. But she could not close her ears.

"It strikes me, cousin dearest," Sirius said, velvet-smooth, "that we've rather neglected you tonight."

What felt like hours later, Lily opened her eyes. She had to blink fuzzily to bring him into focus.

"Not neglected," she said faintly. She determinedly kept her vision off the man lying prostrate on the floor only feet from her, his body twitching exhaustedly every time James selected a new spot of flesh into which to sink the delicate filleting knife one of them had found in the kitchen. She was grateful that he had lost his voice, or perhaps the energy to use it, long ago. Grateful too that James kept Vanishing any puddles of blood that got too big.

"Very much neglected," Sirius disagreed. "James and I have rather been monopolising all the fun for ourselves, haven't we? I'm afraid our manners are lacking. Easily rectified, though – it's your turn now."

His grin widened at the suddenness with which she focussed on him, like a mouse that had caught sight of a cat.

"Oh, yes, Lily," he said softly. "Give me another tale to bring the Dark Lord than the one I think he'd rather hear…"

She swallowed. Slowly, she levered herself to her feet.

"You and James seem to have it all under control," she said scratchily.

"Hey, Prongs!" Sirius barked suddenly. "Don't you think it's time we gave Lily a go? After all, it's her mission too… supposedly."

James looked over at them. Lily pushed down the rising nausea at his expression. She had never seen him look like this, not even two years ago, not ever in her life: a controlled, relaxed emotionlessness, as though the man at their feet was no more than an insect he had stepped on.

It faded away from his face as he looked at her. He was James again, her James, frowning in the old familiar way.

"What do you mean, Padfoot?" he said warily.

Sirius's grin was sly. "Only that I think it's Lily's turn with the target."

"No," he counteracted instantly. His voice was flat. "We discussed this, Padfoot. We're not – I'm not – having Lily take part tonight. It's too soon."

"I don't believe you're the one who makes that decision," Sirius said offhandedly. "Lily does. Come on, cousin – just one little crucio and I'll let you off. It's easy. Look –"

He cast it again, and the cycle started all over again, the lights shining off the wet gleam of blood on the silvery chains, Dearborn keening hoarsely as he curled into a ball in a useless attempt to escape it. Lily kept her gaze firmly on James. She could not, would not, look.

"See?" Sirius said, ending the curse. "Piece of cake. Last thing and then we'll go home. Go on…

"Or," he added casually as she only stood there stupidly, "why doesn't Prongs do it for you?"

That made her look at him. "What?" she whispered.

"Prongs can do it for you," he said again. "Say the word, and have others take your sins on. That's always been what you're good at."

"Leave her alone," James said harshly. "Now is not the time for your inferiority complex, mate. Of course I'll do it. Parting gift for you to remember us by," he added to Dearborn, looking down at him, and his monster's mask was back on his face, only perhaps it wasn't a mask – perhaps it was his real face, as real as the concern he had when he looked at her, as real as the lust he had had that night. Who was Lily to judge?

She had lost the right to judge anyone, ever again.

She moved like a robot as, with a final whispered warning to Dearborn, the boys led her out of the farmhouse, pausing only long enough to release Dearborn from his chains. He made no attempt to waylay them. It was clear that he was long past the point of vengeance. She was silent too as they Apparated back; with a glance at her face, James took her Side-Along. She had just enough feeling left to be grateful. There was no telling how badly she would have Splinched herself in her current state.

With a muttered word to Sirius, James guided her up to her bedroom once they were back at the Manor, his hand steady on the small of her back. It was long past midnight. The house was dark and quiet. He released her only when they were at her door, and he pushed her inside gently before retreating.

"Go to bed, Lily," he said.

She made a sound of agreement, or perhaps she only thought she did. What she did know happened for a fact was that she drifted over to her bathroom, with the vague idea of brushing her teeth, but instead threw up into the sink.

She stared at the half-digested food with detached disgust. It took more effort than it should have to turn on the tap and wash it away. Now she really did have to brush her teeth. She finally emerged from the ensuite and was not surprised to find James sitting on her bed, his hooded cloak gone.

"Oh, fuck," he said, looking up and seeing her face. "Come here."

There was none of that terrible emotionlessness in his face as he pulled her into his arms. Lily thought of resisting, but she did not want to. She did not want to do anything.

Anything except let him fold himself around her and drag her onto the bed, where she fell almost instantly into an exhausted sleep, her wet face pressed against his chest.

AN: Hello! Sorry this is late, as you can see it's pretty long though so hope you enjoy & review! My back is aching from typing for so long now so unfortunately haven't had time to look over it - forgive any typos. Will reply to reviews next chapter as well since I really need to get up now and have a walk around, I'm so sorry.

Really significant chapters now, hope you're as excited as me!