Light in the Darkness

Chapter 80

Adelaide bursted through the glass windows of the Great Hall, crashing harshly on the ground in a plume of black smoke and rolling halfway down the aisle. Many students screamed and the ceiling turned dark and violently thundered as she laid on the floor, bloodied and bruised. 

She had spent the past few days being starved, tortured, and beaten relentlessly by Bellatrix until she looked and felt genuinely broken. Every bone, muscle, and nerve in her body was screaming in pain and she was so hungry she thought she would actually die. It didn't help that she now had shards of glass stinging her arms and legs. Her vision went blurry as she noticed people looking over her. 

She had to remain conscious long enough to find out whether they would immediately call for the Aurors to haul her to Azkaban or bring her to the Hospital Wing. She saw McGonagall kneeling over her with a terrified expression.

Adelaide managed to croak out, "I-I escaped." smiling gently, she tenderly rolled her left arm over and there you could clearly see her forearm was slashed from a dark spell that Bellatrix had performed in great vain to deform the Dark Mark. It had to look as though Adelaide had purposefully spit in the face of the Dark Lord. Of course, the spell wouldn't remove the Mark, it would just heal and reappear in a matter of days.

Adelaide coughed violently and noticed a fair amount of blood was dripping out of her mouth. She was so hungry too. Maybe the Dark Lord just wanted to kill her and send her body to Hogwarts to terrorize them. If so, his plan was looking like it was working.

She suddenly heard a familiar voice, "Addie?" she saw Draco pushing his way through people until he made his way to her and his eyes widened in pure terror and he turned sickly pale, "Addie, oh my gosh!" he went to reach for her, but Blaise had to drag him backwards away from her as Professors began to gather around her. 

She heard Snape hiss, "She is still a Death Eater, she could be dangerous Dumbledore."

Dumbledore looked at her skeptically, "She can do no harm in this state. Take her to Saint Mungos, inform the Ministry what happened, but don't let them take her just yet."

Adelaide let go of her conscious and her vision turned black.

---

Adelaide woke up in a hospital bed, she was no longer in Hogwarts, but in Saint Mungos. She went to move her arms, but noticed they were tied down along with her legs. She went to remove them simply with wandless magic, but she realized that the ropes used to bind her were the same ones her father used that prevented the person to use magic. 

She felt monumentally better from when she was dumped in the Great Hall. She looked over to her left arm, she was right, the slashes were reversed and her Dark Mark was still there. She was secretly hoping it wouldn't heal properly and would actually be gone, but the Dark Lord used intense binding magic on the Mark, it would never disappear. 

A Mediwizard walked in, pausing at the doorway, "Ah, Miss Burke you're awake."

He cleared his throat and made eye contact from some one in the hallway, motioning for them to come in. As the mediwizard walked in, so did an Auror she recognized and the Minister himself. 

The Auror stared at her intensely with a snarl on his face. The Minister squinted, "We've gone through great troubles to find you Miss Burke. Didn't think it would be this easy, you quite literally fell into our hands. Why?"

Adelaide began to speak, and felt a slight twinge of pain left over from her injuries, "I've been trying to escape for so long, I finally escaped." she laughed manically. She knew she had to play it off as though she were on the border of madness, which in all truthfulness she almost was after her several-day ordeal of extraordinary pain.