Faery Heroes

Chapter 42: Facing the Fox

Do you think we tripped a silent alarm?" Hermione questioned.

"Could be that, could be Voldemort's making his play earlier than last time." Thinking quickly, he pointed to the thin forest flanking them and ordered, "Disillusion yourselves and get behind some trees. If this is an enemy and you have a clean shot, take it."

The girls nodded and disappeared into the shadows. Summoning a rock to his hand and quickly charming it, Harry waited to greet their unexpected guests.

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Amelia appeared with a soft crack in the middle of the cobblestone road, and the sound echoed around her as the rest of her retinue arrived. She glanced up and sighed at the sight of the emerald skull and snake glittering evilly in the night sky. "I was hoping they just panicked," she whispered to herself.

Not five minutes earlier, the next shift of Azkaban guards had barged into her office, gibbering in terror about the Dark Mark floating above the prison. Though she had finally managed to calm them down somewhat, she was not looking forward to her new duty. This was the second time in less than six months that Voldemort's Mark had been sighted, and the previous instance had been bad enough.

Diagon Alley in the dead of night was one thing. Azkaban, where the worst of the worst were housed… That was quite another.

"Should we call in the rest of the Department, ma'am?" Shacklebolt asked, his deep voice soft at the implication of the Mark appearing here.

She shook her head sadly. "I doubt it would make any difference; whoever cast this is probably long gone. Tonks, Dawlish, take point. Let's get to the island and get the casualty figures."

"You heard the boss, Johnny boy," the metamorph chirped, grabbing the older wizard's shoulder and shoving him ahead of her. "Meat shields go in front."

"Take your hands off me! I've been doing this job since before you even had a wand!"

"True," Tonks allowed, her wide grin gleaming in the light from their collective wands. "But I'm not the one who cursed his own bollocks off. Get walking, Junior Auror."

Dawlish grumbled bitterly but did as his new superior commanded, and despite the current circumstances Amelia was hard-pressed not to smirk. She had not been pleased with the man the previous summer; he had served on Fudge's security team for the past few years and apparently forgot just whose orders he was supposed to obey. The Minister could not assign tasks to his bodyguards outside of those directly related to his protection, and attacking an underage wizard as Dawlish had young Harry Potter most certainly did not qualify.

Unfortunately, she did not have the manpower to justify firing the man as she wanted to, so she instead had to get a bit… creative with her punishment. John Dawlish had been a Senior Auror with almost twenty years of experience in the department; as a result of his incredible lapse in judgement, all recognition of his service in that time period had been stricken from his records. Officially he was the same as any new recruit, and to further tweak his nose, she had been placing him under Tonks's authority when possible. She was well aware of how he had treated the peppy witch during her final year of training and even her first year as a official Auror, so if the metamorph abused her new power just a little, Amelia was willing to look the other way.