Harry Potter and the Secret Treasures

“My Lord,” Yaxley went on, “Dawlish believes an entire party of Aurors will be used to transfer the boy —.”

Voldemort held up a large white hand, and Yaxley subsided at once, watching resentfully as Voldemort turned back to Snape.

“Evan Mason,” said Voldemort. “Has anyone seen the boy leave Hogwarts with a scepter entwined with two green serpents?”

“Yes, my Lord!” Snape replied. “On the night he went out with Dumbledore, he brought that strange scepter with him. But not long after leaving Hogwarts, Evan Mason disappeared with the scepter. What I’ve learned is that they’re hiding him in the home of a member of the Order of the Phoenix. They intend to hide the boy there as well.”

All the Death Eaters present stared at Voldemort and Snape. They didn’t understand why the topic had suddenly shifted from Harry Potter to Evan Mason and the Twin-Serpent Staff.

They were even more puzzled about what this Twin-Serpent Staff was; some strange scepter entwined by two snakes. Was it a magic item?!

There was another moment of silence. The Death Eaters all took a deep breath. Voldemort stared at the slowly revolving body above his head and pondered.

“In the home of a member of the Order? The old Black family house?”

“It may be there, or it may not be. That house was once the headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix. It is still protected by powerful magic. The Order has appointed a new Secret-Keeper, so I cannot speak the address,” said Snape. “But whether it is that place or not, one thing is certain: the place has been given every protection that the Order and Ministry together could provide. I think that there is little chance of taking him once he is there. They will not stay there long either; they will soon move to a safer place, my Lord, unless… of course, unless the Ministry has fallen before next Saturday, which might give us the opportunity to discover and undo enough of the enchantments to break through the rest.”

“Well, Yaxley?” Voldemort called down the table, the firelight glinting strangely in his red eyes. “Will the Ministry have fallen by next Saturday?”

Once again, all heads turned. Yaxley squared his shoulders.

“My Lord, I have good news on that score. I have — with difficulty, and after great effort — succeeded in placing an Imperius Curse upon Pius Thicknesse.”

Many of those sitting around Yaxley looked impressed; his neighbor, Dolohov, a man with a long, twisted face, clapped him on the back.

“It is a start,” said Voldemort, seemingly unmoved. “But Thicknesse is only one man. Scrimgeour must be surrounded by our people before I act. One failed attempt on the Minister’s life will set me back a long way.”

“Yes — my Lord, that is true — but you know, as Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, Thicknesse has regular contact not only with the Minister himself, but also with the Heads of all the other Ministry departments. It will, I think, be easy now that we have such a high-ranking official under our control, to subjugate the others, and then they can all work together to bring Scrimgeour down.”

“A clever idea — but you are too slow!” said Voldemort in a cold and ruthless voice.

“My Lord…” Yaxley’s expression turned instantly fearful.

“As long as our friend Thicknesse is not discovered before he has converted the rest. At any rate, it remains unlikely that the Ministry will be mine before next Saturday,” said Voldemort. “If we cannot break all the enchantments in time, our only option now is to kill the boy while he travels.”

“We are at an advantage there, my Lord,” said Yaxley, eager to make up for his slowness. “We now have several people planted within the Department of Magical Transport. If Potter Apparates or uses the Floo Network, we shall know immediately.”

“He will not do either,” said Snape. “The Order is eschewing any form of transport that is controlled or regulated by the Ministry; they mistrust everything to do with the place.”

“All the better,” said Voldemort. His left arm, hidden under his black robes, suddenly shook unnaturally, as if something inside couldn’t be suppressed. “He will have to move in the open. Easier to take, by far.”

He paused for a moment, looked up at the slowly revolving body, and then said, “Obviously, Evan Mason will also be involved in this transfer as well. Catch these two boys. I shall attend to them in person. There have been too many mistakes where Evan Mason and Harry Potter are concerned. Some of them have been my own. That Mason and Potter live is due more to my errors than to their triumphs.”

The company around the table watched Voldemort apprehensively, each of them, by his or her expression, afraid that they might be blamed for those failures.

Voldemort, however, seemed to be speaking more to himself than to any of them, still addressing the unconscious body above him.

“I was careless, I underestimated them both, and so have been thwarted by luck and chance, those wreckers of all but the best-laid plans. But I know better now. I understand those things that I did not understand before. I will take the Caduceus from Mason and become a greater being. I must be the one to kill Harry Potter, and I shall be!”

His voice became louder and louder, and his left arm shook more violently under his sleeve.

As Voldemort finished speaking, seemingly in response to his words, a sudden wail sounded, a terrible, drawn-out cry of misery and pain. Many of those at the table looked downward, startled, for the sound had seemed to issue from below their feet.

“Wormtail,” said Voldemort, in the same quiet, thoughtful tone as before, and without removing his eyes from the revolving body above, “have I not spoken to you about keeping our prisoner quiet?”

“Yes, m-my Lord,” gasped a small man halfway down the table.

Peter Pettigrew, if Evan were here, he wouldn’t have recognized him in his current state.

Tortured by Dementors in the deepest part of Azkaban for a long time, he had become a shadow of his former self. His body was so emaciated it was nearly skin and bones, with only his grotesquely large head still retaining its previous size, making him look disturbingly weird.

When Voldemort took over Azkaban and freed all the Death Eaters, he also rescued Peter Pettigrew in the process. He was now a Death Eater too!

But for Peter, these days spent at Voldemort’s side were nothing short of a nightmare — a nightmare even more terrifying than his time in Azkaban.

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