Keeping The Dark Lord (on his toes)

Chapter- 21 Revelations ( 31 December 1994 )

~Voldemort~

Five months passed and Voldemort didn’t know whether he should be thankful or irritated with Ghost’s brother, Dimitri. The young man seemed to pop up everywhere when he wasn’t needed and somehow ended up being needed anyway, but when Voldemort tried to find the young man he was nowhere to be found, and the strange pull he felt also seemed to disappear at those times.

He’d hoped to gain some information about his mate from him, he was Ghost’s brother after all, without poking into some Ministry archives, but so far he’d been unsuccessful and the only thing stopping him from going to the Ministry this very minute, was the thought of hurting and/or disappointing his mate.

He finally managed to track the young man down when he entered the kitchens and he bit back an exasperated sigh as he spotted the amount of food on the dining table in the room next to it. If Dimitri had one flaw…it was that he seemed to be constantly worrying about something, and when it became too much, Voldemort usually found him manually doing things that no Wizarding World-raised witch or wizard would be caught dead doing, such as cooking.

His Death Eaters, however, seemed to love it when the young man made food and one of them seemed to constantly hang around the castle so that they could alert the others.

As if on cue, Voldemort heard a hum of voices coming down the hallway as his Death Eaters invited themselves into his dining room and made themselves at home and Voldemort immediately willed himself to blend in with the shadows because he didn’t want to be spotted by anyone as he observed them.

Dimitri’s presence made the Death Eaters too relaxed, even around him, and that was saying quite a lot when his Death Eaters had been walking on eggshells around him even after his return to sanity.

A tell-tale shimmer of magic from Dimitri’s side caught his eye and Voldemort looked closer, only to frown. There was a thin bracelet-like shape around the other man’s wrist that seemed to have been spelled invisible…but why? And why hadn’t he noticed it before? But then he remembered the young man’s strange habit of constantly wearing robes.

Voldemort willed his new magic to look past the disguise and almost found himself silently cursing the teen as he saw red! How dare he wear something that he gifted to his mate!

But before he could end up doing something stupid, he found himself freezing in place.

The jewelry he’d collected for his mate had all been spelled so that they could only be worn by the intended recipient. Much like the heir rings, which he’d studied closely as he managed to duplicate and modify the spell to suit his needs, the jewelry could only be worn if the recipient’s magic matched the base magic in the spell, such as the magic that he’d pulled up from Ghost’s letters and no one, not even close family, would be able to wear it instead.

He'd originally done so to ensure that no one but Ghost would be able to remove the protective jewelry because he didn’t know the type of life that the other man led, and even as the MoD he didn’t want something to happen to his mate. Dying would still hurt, and he wanted to spare his mate from any and all pain if it was in his power to do so.

But now he seemed to have found another function for it.

He didn’t know how his mate had managed to change his appearance and scent, given that Dimitri was only shorter than him by half a head, and his mate’s true length only came up to his shoulder blades, but now he had a way to identify him and it soothed something inside him to know that his mate was safe within his castle, even if he couldn’t reveal that he knew the young man was Ghost just yet.