SHE'S ALL THAT ➭ SIRIUS BLACK ❨2❩ ✔︎

ACT FIVE, SCENE TWENTY EIGHT

FRANCE

Sage Fontaine-Black had two orders of business in her home country. The first took place in Saint-Veran, to retrieve something she'd left there seventeen years before. The second resided in the underground market of Paris, where someone she needed to meet with lived.

Her first stop had her standing in front of the garden shed behind her childhood home, and despite the fact that the July sun was beating down on her with a heavy heat, she tugged the sleeves of her long-sleeved thermal shirt down over her hands. She would need all the protection she could get for what she was about to do.

When she was eighteen years old, she had returned to the estate—not to the house itself, but the shed out back, a shack that not even her great-grandmother had ever entered, nor anyone in a more recent generation. She'd locked the shed up tight with a bit of magic she hadn't quite understood at such a young age, but she had cast the spell regardless.

It was technically a curse, dark magic untouched by many of her fellow members of the Order. She hadn't meant any harm by it, but she had to assure that no one would ever enter the shed.

The curse was linked to her; as long as she lived and willed it so, the curse would last with just as much strength as it had on its first day of existence.

As she stood in front of the shed, looking at it inquisitively, she wondered how she had ever managed to create it at only eighteen.

But then she remembered the urge she had felt to protect Regulus, no matter the cost. She had to hide what he'd entrusted her to keep safe for him. So a little bit of dark magic seemed to be the best way of tucking it away.

With Voldemort looming on the horizon, she had no other choice than to retrieve it in order to guard it.

The magical wards that were woven into the very wood of the shed rippled as she stripped them away, layer by layer, untilt the shed was just a shed without even a fragment of magic in or around it.

Sage took a deep breath, opened the door, and stepped into the darkness beyond it.

The air inside was stale and musty, and the first breath she took had her coughing up dust and spiderwebs.

Under the still air, there was the sound of something hissing lowly, like a snake trapped beneath the floor of an old, abandoned house.

It was still here, it seemed. Her chest tightened in morbid excitement.

She pulled the wood boards that made up the haphazard flooring of the shed, splinters digging into her hands, until she found the little leather pouch she'd stowed there when she was eighteen.

The hissing only grew louder as she pulled the pendant out of the bag, and for a moment of instability and off-guardedness, she felt anger well up inside her like the first wave of a tsunami.

She remembered what Regulus had told her about this necklace, Salazar Slytherin's locket, and why they had to steal it in the first place. With that information in the forefront of her mind, she shoved it back into the pouch and pulled the drawstrings tightly shut.

She would not be getting possessed today.

☾

Margot Laisser knew her regular clientele quite well. She knew the woman that came in once a week to beg for another reading, praying for her fortunes to change; she knew the young girl who came in every time she got into a new relationship just to see how it would turn out; she even knew the nuns that would walk by and chastize her for practicing 'witchcraft,' even though Margot Laisser knew she practiced no such thing.