LAST TANGO IN PARIS
Chapter Forty-Eight

Hermione didn't know what to expect.

Well, no, that wasn't true either. The intervening years had softened the edges of her memory, but she didn't think she would ever completely forget that face – that sneer, that livid skin, those glowing inhuman eyes. Her wand crackled; the sapphire clattered on the floor and then came to an eerily silent rest. Behind her, the assembled White Hats held their collective breath.

Lord Voldemort staggered, but did not fall.

He was made of sterner stuff than the baby Slytherins had been, Hermione thought. Years and years of that cool blue jail, no telling what it'd done to him because she'd never been able to get a straight answer out of Sal, and now he tottered, he hesitated only for a moment before righting himself.

For a long minute, he did not move. Then he stooped, panther-quick, and picked up the sapphire.

“Blue and blue and ever blue,” he murmured, rolling it in the palm of one taloned hand. “Seasky, seasky. Sleeps and deeps and drowning.” The mad red eyes flicked upward, scanning the crowd behind the enchanted glass with intermittent blips of recognition and hatred, finally narrowing when they found and locked with Hermione's.

“ You .”

She wanted to flinch, but she stood her ground. “Yes.”

“Sweet-lipped witch, what a mouthful you'll be,” he said. He bared his teeth at her. “Is cruelty a color? Does a scream move atoms?”

Hermione swallowed. Voldemort leered at her. “Your body,” he said, “will cool before it kisses the ground.”

Minerva McGonagall let out a disapproving huff of air. Snape's arm tightened around her shoulders. Hermione didn't move.

“Blood,” Voldemort mused. “And tears. Rubies and diamonds, but ever forever and never this or these.” He swayed on his feet, then righted himself again and tossed the sapphire into the air and threw a low guttural sentence of some language Hermione didn't recognise after it. The sapphire stopped falling and sprouted wings. When Hermione's eyes adjusted to the change, she saw that he'd turned it into a small blue bird.

“ Nice,” Joséphine murmured. Ron let out a low, sotto voce whistle.

Ignoring them, Voldemort spoke again. The bird fluttered down to rest on his hand. He stroked it with one finger, never taking his eyes off Hermione.

“Pulse beats a tiny funeral in my palm,” he said. He was holding the bird with two long cruel fingers by the neck, so that they could watch it struggle. “Death for the dearthly watchers? Why whatever not?” He smiled … if you could call the cruel curve of that lipless mouth a smile.

He's absolutely bonkers, Hermione thought, and knew in that instant that he'd read her mind.

“Disaster my cravings, my sly Venus,” he said, swaying again and stepping forward to brace himself against the invisible wall. “Think you immune? Your heart will speed till it flutters in my hand, till I rip it from your chest.” Another word of that strange guttural language, and the frantically struggling bird in his hand exploded – that was the only word for it, Hermione thought, as with a shriek its tidy little body burst its skin, suddenly and fatally pressurized, and became only a Rorschach blot of blood and viscera against Lupin's crystal barrier.

Hermione gasped and took an involuntary step back. Snape's arm tightened on her shoulders once again. Voldemort upended the tiny feathered skull on his palm, smiled, and licked away the rivulet of blood that dribbled from it.

The act seemed to steady him.

“Ah,” he said, flicking away the bird's head and staring at the taloned, scabbed hand that had held it. “I digress. Shall I the company clothes, then?”

A moment later, the red-eyed nightmare disappeared, and in its place was Tom Riddle.

**

“Later,” he said to Hermione, with eyes that promised a slow and painful vengeance. Then he smiled, strode along the blood-spattered barrier, and turned his attention to Dumbledore. “Albus. How positively decrepit you look.”

“You forget, Tom,” Dumbledore said calmly, “that I was old well before you were born.” His gaze swept the glamour that was Riddle and didn't change. If he was troubled, Hermione thought, if he was angry, if his heart ached for the gifted student he'd once mentored all those years ago, you'd never know it to look at him. His blue eyes, wintry and faded, met Riddle's and did not flinch. Riddle sneered.

“Has fear made a coward of you, Headmaster?” He swept one long white hand carelessly against Lupin's barrier, turning the blood of the bird into a gruesome smear of terracotta-coloured wainscoting. For a moment his eyes flickered red. Then he licked his fingers, and they settled to grey again. “Am I still so revered, then, that I cannot walk among you, many as you are?”

Dumbledore ignored him. “I want truth from you, Tom,” he said. Riddle laughed.

“And I want the aged elixir of your liquefied brain, drunk off at a gulp from the brittle chalice of your cooling skull. Will either of us—“ he knocked twice on the dividing wall —“get what we want today? I have my doubts.”

McGonagall growled low in her throat. Riddle fixed her with a stare.

“Maggie,” he said, almost purring as he looked her up and down. “The years are kind to cats, are they not? You scrawny old spinster, I remember the day when we all longed to spread you open and lick the cream from between your legs, every last one of us.” His glamour shifted; he was a seventeen-year-old boy, grave-eyed and unblemished but for the gleam of madness behind his stare. “Would you purr for me now, sweet puss? Shall I court a detention? Wipe down your chalkboards?”

“I believed the best of you then,” McGonagall said tightly. Red spots of colour danced along the high planes of her cheekbones; it wasn't hard, Hermione thought, to picture her as a pretty, idealistic young teacher, fueling the collective fantasies of a hundred teenage boys. “I was wrong.”

“Believed the best?” Voldemort repeated, shaking his head. “Ah, yes. That's the euphemism you all use for underestimated.” His gaze swept the room. “Which is what you did. Every single one of you.”

The candles to either side of him flickered in their sconces like hungry golden tongues, faster and faster now, emitting thin wisps of colorless smoke that curlicued toward him into nothing. Surely he's noticed them by now, Hermione thought, tuning out his continuing monologue to watch. Surely he knows we're drugging him.

But then again, everything he's said so far has been the truth. His version of it, anyway.

Is it working? We need a test .

“—think you're so clever,” Riddle was saying, “with your glass walls and your Containment Charms. You sit in judgment of me, but the truth is I've beaten you all already. There's not a person among you who I haven't touched. There's not a wizard or witch in the world who doesn't yet bear my mark, once I bestowed it.” He smiled at Dumbledore, ghastly and triumphant, monster eyes in a beautiful young face. “You old fool, I've already won.”

“You're wrong,” Snape said, and Riddle's eyes flashed crimson as he spun to identify his challenger.

“Severus,” he said. “I'm wrong, am I? How interesting that you should think so.” He paced toward the glass and planted both bloody palms squarely against it at eye-level. It glowed briefly blue-white, and Hermione saw Remus out of the corner of her eye, palming his wand and murmuring through barely-moving lips. “You of all people should know the truth of those words, the power of this mark ”—here, he spat a gobbet of saliva onto the glass, and laughed as it turned into cold green flame, racing down the wall to meet his cupped palm. He scooped it up and crammed it back into his mouth, licking thin lips, and only then did Hermione realize that he'd burned the Dark Mark black against the shimmering glass. “After all, Severus,” Riddle continued, “I burned it into you in much the same way, did I not? As I recall, you mewled and puked and wallowed in your own vomit, and thanked me for the favour. Just like the rest of them.”

“And yet,” Snape said quietly, “I am free of you.”

Voldemort sneered. “So I heard. But I've grown more skeptical since you've known me. Before I believe, I require proof.”

“Doubting Thomas?” murmured Dumbledore. “Dear me, Tom. Your father named you true, didn't he?”

The monster eyes glowed scarlet. The boy grew another few inches, slendering and hollowing as he stretched into an aquiline young man. “Shut up, old man.” His eyes fixed on Snape. “Well?”

“I don't have to prove anything to you,” Snape said calmly. “Go on and call me, then, if you think I'm still your creature. Make me bleed. Make me sweat.”

“You dare,” Voldemort whispered, eyes flickering to red and back like a broken traffic light. “You fool, you dare? ”

Green light crackled in the sealed-off half of the room, charred the glass in front of Snape to an angry green-grey. Hermione tried instinctively to pull him to one side, but he didn't move, just stood stroking the milky patch of skin on his arm that had once been the Dark Mark. Voldemort ducked the ricochet of his curse, then charged the barrier, snarling. The wall glowed a brighter shade of white-blue where the curse had struck it, but didn't yield.

“How?” he hissed, handsome face pressed into grotesquery by the glass. “How did you do it? I demand to know!” Mouth open, snarling. Teeth too sharp and pointed to belong to that pretty dark-haired boy. “ Tell me! ”

“Give Albus the information he wants,” Snape said calmly, “and I'll tell you.” Under Hermione's hand on his arm, he was shaking. The tremors were so fine, she thought, that no one else could possibly tell.

This, she thought, is the man I love.

**