Shackles

Chapter 4

They entered a small cement room, and in the middle was a pedestal. Draco had read enough wizard adventure stories to know that this set-up never foretold good things.

"What is that?" he asked, pointing at the vessel that sat on the pedestal.

"It's a pensieve," Potter replied, walking slowly closer. "And look."

The other wizard held up a vial that Draco hadn't noticed earlier.

"Memories?" he ventured a guess.

"Memories," Potter confirmed, uncorking the vial and pouring the silvery liquid into the pensieve. "I think that if we want to continue, we have to watch them."

Draco swallowed hard and stepped up beside Potter.

"Well," he said softly. "Let's go."

In they plunged.

A room took shape around them, and Draco recognized it as a morgue. There were three people standing around a body laid out on a table. Draco moved closer, curious, and he heard Potter following closely on his heels. It was a young woman, covered up to her neck by a sheet. Spread out next to her were a set of robes.

"That's Kingsley!" Potter gasped, looking up into the face of a tall wizard in Auror robes. "And Mad-Eye, too."

Draco ignored him and stepped up to the body. He looked down at her face, then looked over at the robes. It didn't take long to figure out some minor details.

"Potions Master," he announced to Potter. "Worked for the Ministry."

Potter abandoned the two Aurors and came up beside him. "Okay, Ministry robes. I'm guessing they belong to her. How do you know she's a Potion's Master?"

"Stains on the front, creases from rolling the sleeves up to the elbow. Singe on one sleeve from working with cauldron flames. Come on, Potter. You saw Snape every single day at Hogwarts."

"Then why is her face and hair not greasy?" Potter asked. "She looks fairly young, too."

"An apprentice, maybe?" Draco walked over to the body, just as the memory finally started playing.

Memory-Kingsley drew back the sheet and said, "Melissa Harburrow, found early this morning in the morgue. Someone brought this body down and put it in here. Last night, she was still in the Potions lab at half nine, when her last co-worker went home for the evening."

"Who has access to this room?" demanded Moody, picking up one of her hands to examine it. "She didn't get down here by herself."

"We already had a team search the lab," the third person, a woman in white robes, reported. "There's no sign of the murder taking place in the lab. The wards were dismantled at about 2 in the morning and reset at 3. The only reason that we found her before her body was cremated was because one of the lab assistants opened the wrong vault."

"That's snake scale," Draco input, looking at the hand that Moody was examining. "Caught under her fingernails. What kind though?"

"She was at the Potions lab at 9:30 last night. So when did she die?" Kingsley asked, frowning.

"Autopsy report is skewed. Her body temperature cooled far more quickly than it would have normally from being in the morgue. Our best guess is between 12 and 2."

"Cause of death?"

"Her blood is completely frozen. Flash frozen, it happened all at once."

"What the hell would cause that?" Potter's expression twisted in a vaguely amusing way.