B.Q Book Four: The Black Queen's War

Chapter 3: The Shambling Horde

If you'll look back to the last chapter, you'll notice a very minor change in the last scene.

Dora was not supposed to be at Jen's birthday party.

She was… otherwise engaged at the time.

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"Zombies," Ted echoed flatly. He was the only one not looking at her in confusion, his Muggle upbringing giving him alone the background needed to recognize her vocabulary. "Please tell me you aren't talking about the walking dead kind of zombies."

Now Andi and Sirius were worried. "Voldemort used Inferii a couple of times last time," said her godfather quietly, almost as though he was thinking out loud. "But it was rare, and he only ever had a few. Not enough to set off the alarm like that, even if replaced every single one he used back then."

She pulled the curtain back and peered out the window again. "I don't think this qualifies as a 'few'."

"But we're safe here, right?" Padma asked frightfully. The Indian girl had spirit, but the issue of corpses reanimated through the darkest of rituals clearly pushed past her limits. "They can't get through the wards?"

"These wards? Not a chance. We could stay in here with Voldemort himself standing out there and be perfectly safe. Everyone's going to be all right."

"…About that." Family and guest slowly turned their heads to stare at her. "No one's friendly with that old couple that lives across the street from us, right?"

"Do I want—"

"No. No, you don't."

"Then again, no reason not to take all possible precautions. Those war wards better still work," Sirius muttered. He laid his right hand over the black stone in the ring on his left index finger, something Jen had always assumed was just a sign of his position in the aristocracy as a Head of House. When he pulled away, a sphere of black and grey marble the size of a lemon hovered between his two hands. He rolled it around in different directions, muttering under his breath the whole time, and strange symbols of golden light swept across the surface and out of sight too fast to be made out.

Not that she was watching too closely. The rest of the house had caught her attention. When she entered Grimmauld Place for the first time, she had been struck not only by the strength and chill of the old house's magic but also by the wards' sheer depth. It had felt as though there were layers upon layers of defenses just waiting to be called forth from their shadowed corners, and she knew without a single doubt that should those wards ever be activated, she would get quite a show. Now seemed to be that time.

The outer wards splintered and folded up into themselves, leaving only a ghost behind as they became armor plating on the outer walls of the house. From the basement came a burst of arctic might and the taste of death, and something truly monstrous emerged. This beast of power spread foul wings over the building just beneath where the wards previously ended, flesh peeling from bone to seep through the brick and mortar like blood through veins while ribs and limbs arrayed themselves in a constantly shifting cage between home and shield. Their non-Black guests gasped in surprise when first a cloud of shadow and cold light danced over their skin and then the screen to the fireplace slammed shut, the stones collapsing into a smooth cube that sank into the floor before the entire wall slid forwards to cover the hole. Spiderwebs of cracks criss-crossed every window, making the glass stronger rather than weaker in the instant before shutters slid home. Sharp-edged shards of a much greater anti-teleportation ward fitted themselves from sky to earth beneath the dome, and these Jen tapped into before they closed, a similar effect that touched her friends' skins playing on her own.