The boot was wailing.
Strangely, that wasn't, in fact, strange, and it was much less annoying than the broken butterbeer bottle portkey that lit up like a firework when its sister piece was disturbed. The blonde at the desk sighed and flicked at it with her wand to silence it.
"Get me Dobbs," she said to the nearest body. When said body didn't respond, she then flicked her wand at it, though it had the opposite of a silencing effect.
"OW! Merlin's most—you have to stop doing that—"
"I need Dobbs," she repeated primly, neatly talking right over the poor boy who rubbed at his hindquarters balefully.
"Is it a disturbance in that Kent park again? Look, I can do it, it's probably just more of those Muggle kids, so let me—"
"I said 'Dobbs.'" Her tone was pure frost and, cowed, the rejected wizard moved in the necessary direction, muttering about how a terrier nearly took his foot off the time he went there, anyway, so he didn't want to go after all, curse them.
When the much sought after Dobbs emerged, all six foot and plus of him, she merely pointed at the now-quiet boot with her wand, never taking her eyes off the roll of parchment her quill was busily scrawling over.
As this was his fourth summoning in two weeks for this particular place, all he did was nod and move to put on his cloak on. He stopped himself and instead gazed reluctantly down at his robes and pointed his wand at himself, replacing the comfortable and efficient uniform with that of a constricting but inconspicuously Muggle one.
Just as he made to take the boot from its shelf, the blonde spoke daintily from her seat, "It's been raining there."
With a pause and a nod, he conjured a mackintosh and laid his hand on the boot, ready for the feeling of a hook around his navel flinging him into the ether.
* * *
Straightening his knees from their braced position, he flicked up the collar of his mac to his ears and began to whistle while looking innocuously over the deserted park. It had been a grey day, faded into a greyer night, and the recent summer rains left the air overly muggy. He found the sister-piece to the portkey he clutched in his hand, all but the toe stuffed beneath a tree root, undisturbed. As his gaze fell on the invisibly marked area, he nearly wrote the disturbance off as a deer or similar animal when he spotted a shape obscured by the nearby bench.
Grasping his wand, he looked quickly around for unexpected company, and then ran as fast as his legs would take him with his wand at the ready until he nearly tripped over the body. Slumped in grotesque imitation of the foetal position was a woman of considerable height and otherwise slight weight but for the unmistakable protrusion of her stomach. Her face was partially hidden by lank hair, of which he could see a chunk had been clean ripped out, but the skin that was visible looked drawn, with bags under the eyes. Where her burlap sack-looking clothing was shoved aside or parted, he could make out a few cuts and bruises of varying stages in the healing process. Were it not for the umistakable signs of her large stomach shifting with the weak rise and fall of her chest, he might have thought her dead.
He didn't need the height or the weight estimations, or the distended belly, to tell him who this was, because he recognized the face in spite of himself.
"No," he murmured, crouching down beside her, "no, no, stay with me, stay with—I'll get you out of here, I'll—"
But he drew back for a moment, his hands hovering over her body at places then flinching away. But resignation crossed his face as he carefully grasped her arm, and with a single pop, the park was once again deserted. |
