Chapter 224 - 223. Meeting in Romania. Part 1. Introduction.

Chapter 223. Meeting in Romania. Part 1. Introduction.

After that day, Helena tried to behave as usual, but Filius Flitwick, Head of Ravenclaw House, who spoke with her quite often, still noticed a small change in his assistant. He didn’t draw attention to it, though. That she had begun speaking much more gently to students instead of simply ignoring them, as she had before, suited him quite well.

The others, unsurprisingly, noticed nothing. Helena rarely spoke with anyone, limiting herself to a few phrases, and among the other spirits, she was a true oddity—rarely attending Death Anniversaries, preferring solitude in the House common room or walks around the castle.

Almost the entire day after the reunion, she stayed in the room with her mother’s portrait, but this raised few questions. After all, she didn’t miss breaks or meals; she still watched over the children of her House, and Myrtle’s help in taking on half the duties freed up a great deal of time.

On Saturday, Helena disappeared for the entire day, while Severus, by one o’clock, was already in Romania, preparing for the upcoming meeting.

Romania. Pitești.

Sitting in a small Muggle restaurant decorated in pleasant orange tones, he gazed thoughtfully out the window, sipping tea and watching people pass by and cars drive past.

In front of him on the table, Nagini radiated childlike joy as she ate a piece of cream cake, squinting contentedly and savoring every bite. Not far from her lay her mirror image in kitten form, though Lucky’s plate held not two pieces but a full five, which he was eating in the same manner, having finally learned to enjoy his food instead of thinking only of filling his belly as quickly as possible.

The meeting was scheduled for two o’clock in the afternoon, not far from the building where he was currently sitting.

To prevent him from preparing or setting a trap, Arnold had only given him the exact time and address at eleven. By that hour, the meeting place was already surrounded by a considerable number of wizards—a full hundred, to be precise—who had positioned themselves around and inside the building where the meeting was to take place.

It was not difficult to sense that many wizards had gathered in one place, no matter how well they tried to hide their presence, especially when every last one of them was a dark wizard.

To Severus, they were like black dots on a white background—hard to miss, constantly catching his eye.

But he had no intention of harming that wizard anyway, and the contract they had signed that morning couldn’t stop him. He had learned to bypass such toys, especially mediocre ones, back in his first year at the Magisterium.

In addition to speaking with that young prodigy and planting a seal in his body, Severus had another reason for coming to this country.

He wanted to track the necromancers, find their main community somewhere in Romania, and verify something.

Half an hour later, after paying the bill under the stunned gaze of a waitress who had frozen at the sight of an empty cake saucer and a kitten lying on the table with his belly sticking out, he scooped Lucky into his arms and left the restaurant, heading along a not particularly crowded street toward the meeting place two blocks ahead.

Nagini, though she looked quite calm, was deeply tense about the upcoming meeting with the person she had seen in that vision.

After all, Severus had kept his word and shown her the man, and told her his plan for him.

When they crossed the road at a crosswalk together with a small stream of Muggles, Nagini felt a warm palm on top of her head, making her flinch, and after a few seconds she calmed down and relaxed a little.

"Don’t worry. I won’t let that happen."

"I know, but still... it’s strange, meeting someone who might kill you in the future." She sighed, resting her head on his shoulder and closing her eyes.

"I won’t argue, but there’s nothing strange about it. It was a simple vision. Visions can always be changed." He looked at her with an encouraging smile, then went on. "Aren’t I right? We’re already changing it."

"What if we aren’t changing anything? What if we acted the same way in that vision?"

"That could be." He didn’t deny the possibility; he had already thought of it himself. "But I said I would change the future, and that means I will. Or don’t you believe in me?" He drew out the words, squinting with feigned displeasure and poking her nose, which earned him a disgruntled snort.

"I believe in you, and I always will." Nagini huffed and poked him in the side in return.

"Then stop thinking about foolish things."

~Meow! As if to back him up, Lucky extended his claws and meowed threateningly. Then he looked around, spotted a Muggle policeman in a fur coat and cap standing with his back to a small kiosk, a striped black-and-white baton on his belt, and to prove his strength, the little one disappeared and returned a moment later.

A few seconds later they heard a startled cry.

"What the hell?!" The policeman spun around at three dull knocks. Seeing the pitiful state of his baton, now divided into three perfectly even pieces, he froze in place, staring at them with bulging eyes.

Nagini watched without much surprise. She had once seen Lucky playing with the Chimera King, and the Chimera, in a state of incredible rage, had tried to swat him, while Lucky playfully dodged every attack and hissed something back that only made the lion more agitated and determined to swat him with twice as much force.

Severus, however, didn’t hold back. He flicked the arrogant kitten on the forehead, and Lucky meowed pitifully in response.

"Don’t cause problems for people you don’t know, at least not until they’ve offended you. Understood?"

"Meow..." Lucky whined, offended, and turned away, which provoked cheerful hissing from Nagini. Severus couldn’t hold back a smirk at the sight of that offended little face, but he didn’t succumb to the charms. Nagini, however, still felt sorry for the little actor and stroked his back with her tail. He purred contentedly in response.

"Insolent kitten..." But Severus resisted the urge to flick him again, and as they were already approaching the meeting place he said, "Go on, run. I don’t want you to be noticed."

"Meow!" Nodding confidently, Lucky disappeared, and Severus broke into a crooked smile at the sight of that incredible speed. Even with his current strength, he could barely follow him.

"The perfect spy... and killer."

By now Severus was surrounded by dark wizards pretending to be ordinary Muggles, yet no one looked at him in his black robe and hood, as if he were invisible.

"You too, go ahead."

"All right." Nodding slightly, Nagini began to shrink before his eyes, and in a few seconds she was the size of a thumb. After admiring her for a few seconds under her slightly displeased, squinting gaze, he slipped her into his front pocket.

"You should take this form more often."

"Hmph!"

"So small, defenseless, but very poisonous... I could just hug you to death."

"I’ll bite you right now," she hissed with a trace of anger to hide her embarrassment, peering out of the front pocket at Severus with her black eyes.

"All right, I’ll be quiet." He smirked, stroking the top of her head with his finger. Then, raising his gaze to a small two-story building resembling an ordinary warehouse with multiple exits for cars, he finally dispelled the charms. At that same moment, dozens of pairs of eyes focused on him.

The dark wizards guarding the building were, to put it mildly, shocked when an unknown wizard appeared directly in front of them, bypassing the anti-Apparition charms and the barrier that should have detected him immediately. They tensed at once.

But as soon as the stranger threw back his hood, revealing a man over forty with light stubble, short dark hair, and a small scar on his cheek, they relaxed a little and did not try to stop him, immediately recognizing the man they were scheduled to meet.

The meeting place was a small but empty hangar, where three dozen wizards had gathered in dark robes, all sharing one common feature: an unhealthy pallor.

Most of them looked at the newcomer with sullen contempt, simply unable to understand why they had all been gathered here, or why they had agreed to a meeting that only one person had attended.

Severus paid them no particular attention. Calmly approaching the round table with its three armchairs, he sat in one of them and, completely ignoring all the gathered necromancers, closed his eyes and waited for the last two to arrive.

At the same time, he examined the building and mentally marked each wizard, so that if it came to a fight, he could kill every one of them with a single precise movement without destroying the hangar.

He didn’t have to wait long. After a few minutes, he sensed the arrival of three more wizards: one Magister at the beginning stage of the rank and two at the middle stage, one of whom, to Severus’s surprise, was almost equal to Arnold in core strength. The others gathered in the hall were mainly Masters, from beginning to peak, and only three of those had reached the peak.

As soon as they entered the room, Severus immediately recognized all three: the first was the commander of the Diamond Division, whose face he had seen in the memories of the leader of the Black Star; the second, the young but very nervous prodigy from Cilian’s vision; and the third, known from the memories of the necromancers gathered here, the head of the community, Xardos.

No one had seen Xardos’s face, hidden under a gray hood, in over two hundred years, and because he always wore gloves, many assumed he had achieved the impossible: become a true Lich, the highest stage of development in Necromancy, an immortal being with incredible magical power who could study magic for the rest of eternity.

At the same time, Sandro was studying Severus, about whom Arnold had told him. But what puzzled Sandro was that he sensed nothing from him, as if a perfectly ordinary, third-rate wizard were sitting in front of him, only...

"Don’t even think about testing him or being rude," Xardos’s husky but wary voice sounded in his head, causing genuine shock to appear on the Diamond Division commander’s face. All Sandro could do was blink in amazement and answer, "Yes."

But for the first time since they had entered the hangar, panic appeared in the young prodigy’s eyes upon hearing the voice of the head of the community, his teacher, who ordered him not to evade and to answer with only the truth if he wanted to survive. The tone of those words made the depth of the trouble he was in immediately clear.

*Yes, damn it, how could I have offended him?!* Robin nearly screamed in his mind, lamenting the injustice of it.

The community leader sighed wearily to himself, looking at Severus’s back. His body was surrounded by a crimson aura, nothing but life force, the sheer size of which always represented a wizard’s strength.

And it was simply astonishing in its size, nearly engulfing the entire hangar.

In that instant, Xardos’s entire being screamed at him to run as far from this person as possible, but his mind understood that it was impossible, so he decided simply to go with the flow.

*If I’d known I’d meet a monster like this, I wouldn’t have come to this damn meeting at all,* he thought melancholically, settling calmly into the seat opposite Severus and preparing for the upcoming conversation in the hope that everything would turn out all right today.

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