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The dream began differently this time.
Harry found himself standing in what appeared to be a vast underground chamber, its walls carved from black stone. Torches burned in sconces along the walls, their flames an unnatural blue-white that cast dancing shadows across intricate runic patterns etched deep into the rock.
At the center of the chamber stood a woman unlike any Harry had ever seen, even in dreams.
She was breathtakingly beautiful in a way that seemed almost supernatural—tall and graceful, with long silver hair. Her skin was pale as porcelain, unmarked by age or hardship, and her eyes were a striking green. She wore robes of deep crimson silk that clung to her curvy form, her large breasts were quite distracting, and her body was beautiful, it felt like looking at a goddess.
But there was something wrong in her beauty, something that made Harry's dream-self instinctively wary. Her smile was too perfect, it felt like looking at a beautiful woman who was hiding a knife.
Around her, carved into the stone floor, was a complex ritual circle inscribed with symbols that hurt Harry's eyes to look at directly. The lines of the circle were dark with what could only be dried blood, and at seven points around its circumference stood iron cages, each containing a figure in wizard's robes.
The captives were clearly terrified, pressing themselves against the bars of their prisons as the woman moved between them with satisfaction. Some pleaded with her in languages Harry didn't recognize. Others simply wept. All of them were young, beautiful in their own right, and Harry realized with sick certainty that she had chosen them as carefully as a connoisseur selecting fine wine.
"My darlings," the woman purred, her voice melodious and warm despite the horror of the situation. "You should feel honored. Your sacrifice will serve a purpose far greater than your small, ordinary lives ever could."
She approached the first cage, where a young wizard with golden hair cowered against the back wall. The woman reached through the bars, caressing his cheek with fingers that left trails of silver light on his skin.
"Such a pretty thing," she murmured. "I remember how eagerly you came to my chambers when I smiled at you in the tavern."
The wizard tried to speak, but he coud not talk, his lips were full of blood and all that came out of him were strange sounds as if he was choking.
"Oh, I took your voice hours ago, my sweet. Can't have you spoiling the ritual with unseemly noise."
She moved to the center of the circle, raising her arms as she began to chant in a language that predated Latin. The words seemed to vibrate through the stone itself, and the dried blood in the carved lines began to glow with a sickly red light.
One by one, she approached each cage. Harry wanted to look away, wanted to wake up, but found himself trapped as an observer. The woman didn't use a blade—instead, she drew cutting curses through the air with her finger, opening precise wounds on her victims that bled freely into chalices that appeared at her command.
With each collection, she grew more radiant. Her skin began to glow, her hair took on an almost ethereal shimmer, and her green eyes glitered like gems.
"Seven souls willingly given," she chanted, though Harry noted grimly that 'willingly' seemed a generous interpretation. "Seven streams of life to fuel the sight beyond sight."
As the final chalice filled, the woman raised it high above her head. The liquid within wasn't red anymore—it had transformed into something that looked like a pool of water full of stars, glittering.
She drank it all.
Power radiated from her in visible waves, and her eyes blazed so brightly that Harry had to shield his face even in the dream. When the light faded, she stood, still beautiful, but her skin was different, it was shinning as if it were made of stars.
Then she turned, looking past Harry toward something he couldn't see, and her perfect lips curved in a triumphant smile.
"I can finally see you," she whispered, her voice filled with awe and hunger. "You've been watching all along, haven't you?"
Harry spun around, following her gaze, but saw nothing except empty shadows. The woman was clearly addressing something—or someone—but whatever she perceived was invisible to him.
"Don't hide from me now," she continued, taking a step toward the empty space. "I've paid the price. I've opened the sight. Show yourself."
The silence stretched on, broken only by the soft whimpering of the dying captives in their cages. Harry strained his senses, trying to perceive whatever the woman was seeing, but detected nothing.
Was she mad? Had the dark ritual finally broken her mind, leaving her speaking to phantoms and shadows?
The woman raised her hand, drawing a cutting curse across her palm. Blood welled from the wound, but this time it was different—silver mixed with red, glowing with the same ethereal light as the chalice had contained.
"One more gift," she murmured, letting the luminous blood drip onto the ritual circle. "One more sacrifice to strengthen the connection."
But before Harry could see what happened next, the dream shattered like glass, leaving him gasping and shivering in his bed at Privet Drive.
He sat up slowly, running shaking hands through his hair as he tried to process what he'd just experienced. The dream had been more vivid than any before it—not just visual, but filled with sounds, smells, even the phantom sensation of that otherworldly energy radiating from the transformed witch.
"Mad," Harry muttered to himself, his voice hoarse in the pre-dawn darkness. "She was completely mad. All that power, all that blood, and for what? To talk to empty air?"
The blood magic book lay on his desk where he'd left it the night before, wrapped in its black cloth like something shameful that needed hiding. Harry stared at it with growing revulsion. If that's what blood magic did to people—drove them to murder innocents and speak to phantoms—then he wanted no part of it.
But even as he tried to dismiss the dream as a cautionary tale about the dangers of dark magic, doubt gnawed at him. The woman hadn't seemed mad in the conventional sense. Ruthless, certainly. Evil, without question. But her actions had been calculated, purposeful. She'd known exactly what she was doing throughout that horrific ritual.
And she had definitely seen something.
Harry rubbed his eyes, trying to banish the memory of her violet gaze fixed on that empty space with such intensity. What if she hadn't been insane? What if the ritual had actually worked, giving her the ability to perceive something that existed beyond normal human senses?
After all, who was he to dismiss the impossible? He'd survived falling through the Veil—something no one in recorded history had ever accomplished. He could speak to serpents, a very rare ability. His accidental magic had always been unusually strong, and now he was learning wandless spells at a rate that shocked even experienced Aurors.
If he could do the impossible, why couldn't others?
Harry's gaze drifted to his window, where the first hints of dawn were beginning to lighten the sky. What if there really were things watching from beyond the Veil? Things that had taken notice when he'd done the impossible and returned from their realm?
The idea made his skin crawl. During his time beyond the Veil, he'd experienced that terrible emptiness, that dissolution of self. But what if something else had been there in that void with him? Something that had followed him back?
He shook his head violently, trying to dispel the paranoid thoughts. This was exactly what he'd been afraid of—letting the dreams and the stress of his situation drive him toward the same kind of madness that had consumed the blood witch.
Standing abruptly, Harry grabbed the blood magic book from his desk. For a moment he considered throwing it out the window, letting it fall into Petunia's precious flower garden where it could rot with the mulch. The temptation was strong.
Instead, he wrapped it more tightly in its black cloth and shoved it into the bottom of his trunk beneath his winter robes. He wouldn't read it again, wouldn't let its promises of power tempt him down the same path as the beautiful witch in his dream.
There were other ways to grow stronger. Safer ways.
The wandless magic book still lay open on his desk, its pages filled with techniques that felt natural rather than corrupting.
This was the path he would follow. Difficult, certainly, but clean. He would become strong enough to protect those he cared about without sacrificing his sanity or his soul in the process.
The blood witch could keep her phantom conversations and her terrible power. Harry had seen where that road led, and he wanted no part of it.
Afternoon - The Following Day
The afternoon sun beat down mercilessly on the back garden of Number Four Privet Drive, but Harry barely noticed the heat. He stood in the shade of the oak tree, sweat beading on his forehead from concentration rather than the weather, his right hand extended palm-up as he attempted the spell for what felt like the hundredth time.
"Come on," he muttered under his breath, focusing on that strange mix of rage and protective instinct that had first called the chains into existence. The memory of Bellatrix's cruel laughter echoed in his mind, followed immediately by Snape's sneer as he'd mocked Sirius's death.
A faint red shimmer appeared above his palm, wavering like heat distortion before solidifying into a single crimson chain link. Harry's heart leaped—progress at last—but the manifestation lasted only seconds before dissolving back into nothing.
He lowered his hand with a frustrated sigh, rolling his shoulders to work out the tension. The spell was there, lurking just beneath the surface of his consciousness like a half-remembered song. Every time he reached for it, he could almost grasp its essence, but it slipped away the moment he tried to force it into being.
It was different from the wandless magic he'd been learning from Cassius Meridian's text. Those spells required careful meditation, a conscious channeling of his magical core through will and intent. The chains, however, felt instinctive—like flexing a muscle he'd never known he possessed until crisis had awakened it.
Harry glanced around the garden. The sensation had been growing stronger all day, a persistent itch between his shoulder blades that suggested hidden watchers. The neighboring houses looked innocuous enough—net curtains drawn against the afternoon heat, gardens empty save for the occasional cat.
He was being paranoid. Had to be. The dream of the blood witch had unsettled him more than he cared to admit, leaving him jumpy and suspicious of every shifting shadow.
"Focus," Harry told himself firmly, raising his hand once more. This time he tried a different approach, thinking not of rage but of protection—of wrapping chains around those he cared about to keep them safe from harm.
The red shimmer appeared again, stronger now, coalescing into three interlinked chains that stretched from his palm toward the garden shed. They were translucent, lacking the solid menace of the versions that had wounded Bellatrix and Snape, but they were undeniably there.
Harry held them for nearly a minute before they faded, satisfaction warming his chest. It was progress, even if the chains lacked the vicious spikes and autonomous movement of their more violent incarnations.
A soft crack from behind the garden fence made him spin around, wand appearing in his hand. Nothing. Just Mrs. Figg's cat picking its way delicately across her vegetable patch. But the feeling of being observed persisted, stronger now, as if his paranoia was feeding on itself.
By the time evening shadows began to lengthen, Harry had managed to produce the chains seven times out of fifteen attempts. Each success felt like solving a puzzle where half the pieces were missing—he could see the shape of what he was trying to accomplish, but the method remained frustratingly elusive.
The soft thump of feet landing on the garden shed's roof announced Tonks's arrival before she dropped not so gracefully to the ground, her hair a warm auburn. She'd traded her usual Auror robes for dark jeans and a fitted green t-shirt that did interesting things to Harry's ability to concentrate.
"Evening, Potter," she said with that crooked smile that never failed to make his stomach do small somersaults. "How goes the secret training?"
"Slowly," Harry admitted, then hesitated. The urge to demonstrate his progress warred with uncertainty about how she might react to seeing magic that even he didn't fully understand. "Though I did make some headway on something."
Tonks tilted her head, curiosity sparking in her dark eyes. "Oh? Care to share with the class?"
Harry glanced around the garden one more time, that persistent sense of observation making his skin crawl. "Do you... do you feel like we're being watched?"
She followed his gaze, her posture subtly shifting into the alert readiness of a trained Auror. After a moment, she shook her head. "Nothing magical, at least. Why?"
"I've had this feeling all day. Like someone's keeping tabs on me." Harry rubbed the back of his neck, feeling foolish. "Probably just paranoia."
"Paranoia keeps Aurors alive," Tonks said seriously, though she relaxed slightly. "Trust your instincts, but don't let them paralyze you. Now, what were you going to show me?"
Harry took a steadying breath and extended his hand, focusing on that protective instinct he'd discovered. The red chains materialized more easily this time, perhaps responding to Tonks's presence—three interwoven links stretching from his palm to wrap loosely around a garden gnome's ceramic hat.
"Bloody hell," Tonks breathed, her eyes widening. "Harry, what is that?"
"I'm not entirely sure," he admitted, maintaining the chains with careful concentration. "It first happened when I fought Bellatrix at the Ministry. Then again when Snape... when he said some things about Sirius. I've been calling it Catena Cruenta—Blood Chain—because of the color and how it seems to respond to strong emotions."
Tonks circled around him slowly, studying the manifestation from different angles like an Auror examining evidence. "I've never seen anything like this. Chain conjuration isn't taught at Hogwarts—hell, I don't think it's taught anywhere. Where did you learn it?"
"That's just it—I didn't learn it. It just... happened." Harry let the chains fade, flexing his fingers to work out the lingering tingle of magic. "It feels familiar, like something I've always known but forgot until I needed it."
"That's..." Tonks paused, clearly choosing her words carefully. "That's not normal, Harry. Spontaneous spell creation is advanced magic, usually requiring years of theoretical study."
"Nothing about me has been normal lately," Harry pointed out with a wry smile. "Why start now?"
"Fair point. Can you do it again?"
Harry complied, this time managing four chains that moved like snakes through the air. As he worked, Tonks moved closer, ostensibly to get a better view of the magic but bringing her near enough that he could catch her scent—something floral with an underlying hint of the night air she'd flown through.
"The way they move," she murmured, her breath warm against his ear as she leaned in. "They're almost alive."
The chains wavered as Harry's concentration faltered, distracted by her proximity. "They feel alive sometimes. Especially when I'm angry. Like they want to hurt whatever I'm angry at."
"That's what worries me." Tonks stepped back, though not as far as she probably should have. "Magic that responds to strong emotion can be dangerous, Harry. It can get away from you."
"Everything about magic can be dangerous," Harry replied, letting the chains dissipate. "But I need to understand this. It could be useful."
"Or it could hurt someone you care about." Her expression was serious now, the trained Auror overtaking the young woman. "Promise me you'll be careful with this. Don't practice when you're upset or angry."
"I promise," Harry said, meaning it. The last thing he wanted was to accidentally hurt Tonks—or anyone else—with magic he didn't fully control.
The moment stretched between them. Tonks was close enough that he could see the flecks of gold in her brown eyes, could count the light freckles across her nose. Her gaze dropped to his lips for just an instant before she caught herself and stepped back properly.
"Right," she said, her voice slightly breathless. "Shall we get on with the actual training then?"
But even as they moved through their usual routine of combat drills and wandless practice, Harry couldn't shake the feeling that they were performing for an invisible audience. Every shadow seemed to hide potential watchers.
And when Tonks corrected his stance, her hands warm against his shoulders as she adjusted his position, Harry found himself wondering if their unseen observers were taking note of that too.
Night
The house had been quiet for hours when Harry finally allowed himself to relax. He sat cross-legged on his bed, the wandless magic book open in his lap, trying to focus on a particularly complex passage about magical core refinement. But concentration eluded him—that persistent feeling of being watched had only grown stronger throughout the evening, even after Tonks had left.
Every creak of the settling house made him look up. Every whisper of wind through the trees outside had him checking the windows. The Dursleys had been asleep for over an hour, their snores filtering through the thin walls, but Harry couldn't shake the sensation that something was wrong.
He was reaching for his water glass when instinct screamed a warning.
Harry threw himself sideways just as a bolt of sickly yellow light seared through the air where his head had been, striking the wall behind his bed and leaving a smoking crater in the plaster. He hit the floor hard, his book flying across the room as he rolled and came up with his wand in hand.
"Lumos!"
Harsh white light flooded the room, revealing a figure that made Harry's blood run cold. The house-elf was old, very old, almost like a Dumbledore of elves, his wrinkled skin hanging in loose folds like old parchment. His ears were enormous even by elf standards, drooping nearly to his shoulders, and his nose was so long and crooked it resembled a twisted branch. But it was his right arm that drew Harry's attention—from shoulder to fingertip, it glowed a bright, angry red like heated metal.
The elf wore what might once have been a tea towel, though it was now so stained and tattered it looked more like a collection of rags held together by spite. His bulging eyes fixed on Harry with malice.
"Harry Potter," the elf said, his voice like grinding stone. "At last, Reggy finds the boy who must die."
"Who are you?" Harry demanded, keeping his wand trained on the intruder while his mind raced. House-elves attacking wizards was virtually unheard of—their magic bound them to serve, not harm. "What do you want?"
"Reggy has told you—Reggy is here to kill Harry Potter and his dear relatives," the elf replied with disturbing calm. "Reggy has been commanded, and Reggy obeys."
"I don't care what happens to the Dursleys," Harry said quickly, hoping to defuse the situation. "You don't need to—"
"LIES!" Reggy shrieked, his voice rising to a pitch that made Harry wince. "Harry Potter protects them with blood magic! Reggy can smell it—old magic, powerful magic! They are precious to Harry Potter!"
The elf raised his glowing red arm, and Harry barely had time to throw up a shield before a wave of scorching air slammed into him. The magic wasn't wizard kind, it was elf magic.
He gestured with his normal left hand, and the floorboards beneath Harry's feet suddenly became liquid, sucking at his trainers like quicksand. Harry yelped and dove forward, rolling across his desk chair just as the wooden floor snapped back to solidity with a sound like breaking bones.
"What the hell are you?" Harry gasped, scrambling to his feet.
"Reggy is old," the elf said conversationally, as if they were old friends. "Older than Harry Potter's bloodline. Older than the house Harry Potter lives in. Reggy remembers when wizards begged elves for magic lessons."
Another gesture, and Harry's bedroom window exploded inward in a shower of glass and twisted metal. But instead of falling, the shards hung suspended in mid-air, rotating slowly before launching themselves at Harry like a swarm of crystal wasps.
Harry threw himself behind his bed, feeling glass fragments tear through his pajama shirt. "Protego!"
His shield held for perhaps three seconds before the sustained barrage shattered it. More glass cut across his shoulders and arms as he rolled desperately across the floor, leaving bloody streaks on the carpet.
"Incendio!" Harry snarled, sending a gout of flame toward the elf.
Reggy made a dismissive sound and waved his red arm. The fire bent around him like water flowing around a stone, leaving him completely untouched. Worse, the flames seemed to feed his arm's glow, making the crimson light pulse brighter.
"Fire feeds Reggy," the elf explained helpfully. "Reggy's master marked Reggy with flame that never dies. Now fire makes Reggy stronger."
He clapped his hands together, and the air around Harry suddenly became thick as honey. Each breath required tremendous effort, as if he were trying to inhale syrup. Harry staggered, his lungs burning as he fought against the suffocating atmosphere.
"Finite," he wheezed, pouring as much power as he could into the counterspell.
The thickened air cleared, but Reggy was already moving. The elf leaped from floor to wall to ceiling, his long fingers leaving deep gouges in the plaster wherever he touched.
"Harry Potter fights well for a child," Reggy observed from his perch upside-down on the ceiling. "But Reggy has killed many wizards. Strong wizards. Clever wizards. They all die the same."
He dropped like a stone, his red arm extended toward Harry's face. Harry threw himself backward, feeling heat wash over him as the glowing limb passed inches from his nose. The elf landed in a crouch and immediately spun, his leg sweeping Harry's feet out from under him.
Harry hit the floor hard, his wand skittering across the room. He rolled desperately as Reggy's burning hand slammed into the carpet where his head had been, leaving a smoking handprint in the fibers.
"Accio wand!" Harry shouted, grateful when his holly wand flew back to his grasp.
"Clever boy," Reggy acknowledged, then gestured at the walls around them. "But trapped boy."
Harry's blood ran cold as he realized what the elf meant. The walls of his bedroom were stretching upward, the ceiling rising higher and higher until it disappeared into shadow. But the room wasn't actually getting bigger—instead, the floor beneath them was sinking, creating a pit with smooth, unscalable sides.
In desperation, he reached for the one spell that might work. Not through careful meditation or conscious channeling of his magical core, but through raw need and the fury of being hunted.
Harry raised his wand, thinking of chains, of binding, of wrapping something so tightly around his enemy that escape became impossible.
"Catena Cruenta!"
A red chain erupted from his wand tip like a striking serpent, but this one was nothing like the gentle practice versions he'd shown Tonks. This chain was thick as his wrist with small spikes along it. And at its tip—
Harry's breath caught as he saw the chain's terminus had formed into the shape of a bird's head, complete with a cruel hooked beak and eyes that burned like coals.
Reggy's confident expression vanished, replaced by something Harry had never seen in the ancient elf's features before: pure, primordial terror.
"No," Reggy whispered, pressing himself against the wall of the pit. "Not that magic. Reggy knows that magic. Reggy fears that magic."
The chain-serpent struck with lightning speed, coiling around the elf's throat before he could react. Reggy screamed—a sound of such anguish that Harry instinctively tried to call back the spell.
"Stop," Harry commanded, but the chain ignored him.
The bird's head at the tip opened its beak wide and bit down on the chain itself, forming a perfect noose around Reggy's neck. The ancient elf clawed at the binding with both hands—normal and glowing—but his fingers passed through the magical construct without affecting it.
"Please," Reggy gasped, his bulging eyes now bulging for an entirely different reason. "Reggy was only following orders. Reggy must obey. Reggy has no choice."
"I said STOP!" Harry shouted, pouring all his will into canceling the spell.
The chain tightened further, cutting off Reggy's words. The elf's struggles grew weaker, his glowing arm beginning to dim. Harry felt sick—this wasn't what he'd intended. He'd wanted to bind the elf, not execute him.
But the spell remained beyond his control, operating according to its own vicious logic. The chain-serpent seemed to pulse with satisfaction as it slowly strangled its victim, and Harry realized with horror that he'd created something that fed on pain and death.
Then a spell Harry didn't recognize struck the chain, and it crumbled to nothing.
The chain crumbled like ash the moment the unknown spell struck it, releasing Reggy to collapse gasping on the floor of what had been Harry's transformed bedroom. The ancient elf clutched his throat, wheezing desperately as his glowing red arm flickered like a dying flame.
"MINISTRY AURORS!" The commanding voice of Kingsley Shacklebolt boomed through the night as dark figures poured through the shattered window frame. "Nobody move!"
Harry raised his hands slowly, his wand held carefully away from his body as half a dozen Aurors surrounded the scene. The pit Reggy had created was already reverting to normal, the walls shrinking back down to their proper height with a sound like reality reasserting itself.
"Stupefy! Stupefy! Incarcerous!"
Multiple spells struck the still-gasping house-elf simultaneously. Reggy went rigid, his bulging eyes rolling back as thick ropes wrapped around his ancient form. The red glow of his arm finally died completely, leaving him looking like nothing more than a particularly ugly garden ornament.
"Harry!" Tonks's voice cut through the organized chaos as she vaulted through the window, her violet hair wild and her dark eyes scanning him frantically for injuries. "Are you hurt? What the bloody hell happened?"
Before Harry could answer, she was at his side, her hands moving professionally over his arms and shoulders, cataloguing the cuts from the glass shards and the burns from Reggy's heat magic.
"I'm okay," Harry said, though his voice came out shakier than he'd intended. "Just cuts and scrapes."
"Drink this and let me handle the cuts."
Harry obeyed, feeling the potion's warmth spread through his system as his minor injuries began to close. Around them, the other Aurors worked, securing the scene and documenting everything with quick-quotes quills and magical cameras.
"Mr. Potter." Kingsley Shacklebolt approached, his deep voice careful and controlled. The tall Auror's expression was unreadable as he surveyed the damaged room. "Are you able to give us a preliminary statement?"
"The house-elf attacked me," Harry said immediately, wanting to make that clear before any assumptions were made. "He said his name was Reggy, and that he was here to kill me and the Dursleys. I was just defending myself."
A murmur went through the assembled Aurors. Harry caught fragments of their whispered conversations—"house-elf attacks are practically unheard of" and "binding magic gone wrong" and "what kind of spell creates chains like that?"
"He attacked unprovoked?" Shacklebolt asked, his quill hovering over an official-looking form. "You did nothing to threaten or provoke him?"
"I was reading in my room," Harry said. "He appeared and immediately started throwing killing curses. Well, not Avada Kedavra specifically, but spells that would definitely have killed me if they'd connected."
Tonks finished healing his cuts and moved to examine the scorch marks on the wall and carpet. "The magical residue is definitely house-elf magic," she reported to Shacklebolt. "But it's unlike anything in our databases. This elf was using combat magic—offensive spells designed to kill."
"Impossible," one of the other Aurors muttered. "House-elf magic is bound by their nature to serve and protect."
"Tell that to the crater in my wall," Harry said dryly, gesturing at the smoking hole where Reggy's first spell had struck.
Shacklebolt crouched beside the unconscious elf, studying the ancient creature with professional interest. "This one's old. Very old. The binding magic on him feels... different. Corrupted, perhaps."
"What about the chains?" another Auror asked, this one Harry didn't recognize. "We detected the magical signature from three streets away. That kind of power spike usually indicates dark magic."
Harry's stomach clenched, but Tonks answered before he could speak. "Self-defense magic often registers as darker than it actually is," she said smoothly. "Adrenaline and fear can push spells beyond their normal parameters."
"Indeed," Shacklebolt agreed, though his sharp eyes remained fixed on Harry. "Mr. Potter, I'm afraid you'll need to come with us to provide a full statement. The use of unknown magic in a residential area, even in self-defense, requires official documentation."
"Am I in trouble?" Harry asked.
"No," Shacklebolt said firmly. "You were clearly defending yourself against an unprovoked attack. But the Ministry needs to understand what happened here tonight. House-elf attacks on wizards are so rare they're practically mythical, and the magic you used..." He paused delicately. "Well, it's not in any of our textbooks."
Harry nodded, relief flooding through him. At least he wasn't going to be arrested for defending himself.
"Can I get dressed first?" he asked, suddenly aware that he was still in his torn, bloody pajamas.
"Of course," Shacklebolt said. "Tonks, stay with him. The rest of you, finish documenting the scene and prepare for transport."
As the other Aurors dispersed to their tasks, Tonks stayed with Harry as he starts wearing better clothes.
As he pulled on his jeans, Tonks moved closer, lowering her voice further. "Hey," she said gently, "everything's going to be alright. It would have been troublesome if the elf had disappeared before we arrived, but since he's captured, you have nothing to worry about."
Harry paused in buttoning his shirt, a new concern forming. "Does this mean the Ministry will decide to have me stay somewhere else? Since it's clear this place isn't safe?"
Tonks hesitated, her hair shifting to a darker shade that reflected her uncertainty. "I'm not sure myself," she admitted. "That'll be up to Bones and the new Minister, I suppose. But Harry, after tonight..." She gestured at the destroyed room. "It's hard to argue that the blood wards are providing adequate protection."
A sharp crack announced the arrival of more Ministry personnel—members of the Department for Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures, judging by their distinctive bronze badges.
"Right then," Shacklebolt called out. "Time to go. Mr. Potter, if you're ready?"
Harry nodded, casting one last look around his destroyed bedroom. The Dursleys would wake to find their nephew gone and their house damaged by a magical battle they'd slept through. Somehow, he doubted they'd be particularly surprised.
As Tonks offered him her arm for Side-Along Apparition, Harry couldn't shake the feeling that this was just the beginning. Reggy had been old, ancient even, with knowledge of magic that predated modern wizarding society.
And he'd been sent to kill Harry specifically.
The question was: by whom?
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