The Mark of a Death Eater : Sequel

Chapter Seventeen

The noises of the house vanished, replaced with the soft sounds of the woods. I shook off the feeling that Disapparition brought and took a look around. We had apperated a little further than I expected, but it was fine. Higher up the path, a large mansion blocked out the stars. The lights were all out but one. I knew the room. Rigel was awake, probably reading up on astrology or working on a work assignment. If he still worked at all. I wondered why my family wasn't in hiding yet. Maybe they thought that because they were pure blooded they weren't under any threat of the snatchers. But didn't it occur to them that Voldemort would perhaps hunt them down in order to punish me? Last I knew, they weren't in the house, and were still overseas, but Rigel's lit bedroom said otherwise.

All this I though in a few seconds, then I heard the little girl scream. The air came alive with her shout, and birds squawked and flapped high above the trees of the dense wood.
Her mother was looking at me with a horrified expression on her face.

It was only at that moment that I became aware of the pain that tore through my arm. I glanced down and stifled a scream. My arm look mangled. A large part of it was cut, as if a knife had been ripped through it. It wasn't a neat cut either. My sleeve had been ripped away and the cut had pulled through my dark mark. I'd been splinched. It probably happened when Caspar tried to grab me. I hoped he was hurt at least as much as I was.

I turned around, and threw up in a patch of wildflowers.

The woman tried to shush her daughter. I couldn't look at them. I needed to get back to the house. Caspar had seen me take the two. He would know of my betrayal.

No matter what I did, I was always betraying someone, even when I was doing something right.

I felt a cold hand on my shoulder and spun around. My arm hurt so bad I gave an involuntary scream of pain and dropped my wand. The woman picked it up and pointed it at me. Even though I was no better, I didn't understand how she could so that. She seemed civil enough. She didn't look like the type that would steal wands from teenage girls who have just saved hers and her daughters lives and turn it on them. Be fair, I thought. She has no wand and you're a death eater. What would you do? I didn't have the ability to stop her, though - my arm hurt too much. So I sat on the stone pathway that led up to my home and waited for her to kill me.

The moment never came.

Instead, she crouched above me. In the moonlight, the woman's face was illuminated. She had the same chocolate brown curls as her little girl. She was murmuring something, pointing the wand at my arm. A burning sensation crept along the wound, as if it were being set alight. I must've screamed, and somewhere along the little girl had began crying again, but after a while, the burning receded and the pain stopped.

The woman helped me sit up and I glanced at my arm. The wound looked like a shallow cut now, hardly longer than my finger.
I stared up at the woman in surprise.
"How did you-"
"I was a healer at St. Mungo's, before we had to go into hiding," she explained.

She pulled my arm over her shoulder and helped me stand.
When I was steady, she handed my my wand.
"Thank you," I woman said. "I don't know who you are, but I owe you." Her eyes flashed past my arm, where my dark mark was healed and whole once again.
"You healed me. Let's call it even," I said, trying to tug my torn sleeve over it.
"You saved my daughter too." She hugged her girl. "That's a lot, to a mother."

I flexed my left arm, and found it hurt only a little.
"Go up to the house. Say you're looking for Rigel, and that I - that Emma, sent you. Give them this." I pulled the letter that Rigel had sent to me regarding his marriage out of my robes. My fingers brushed another paper, another token in my pocket and I flinched. "Tell him... Tell him what I did, please." Perhaps I'd be redeemed in my brothers eyes.