Chapter 48:
– Harry Sitri –
The screaming was the worst part. Three hundred and twelve passengers, all of them convinced they were about to die, filling the cabin with their loud screams.
Think. Think. Think, you idiot. You have maybe fifteen seconds.
I was already out of my seatbelt. First class had dissolved into pure chaos around me. Oxygen masks swung from the ceiling, luggage tumbled from overhead bins, and a drink cart had broken free and was rolling down the aisle like a battering ram. Jasmine had a white-knuckle grip on her armrest, her eyes huge behind her glasses and locked on me with absolute trust that I was going to fix this. Marlene had one arm wrapped protectively around her daughter and the other braced against the seat in front of her. Asia was clutching a pillow to her chest and praying so fast the words blurred together, tears streaming down her cheeks.
Or were those tears because she was a Devil now and praying actually hurt her?
I'd have to talk to her more about that after we survived.
Regardless, the pain the prayers caused me just made me clear my mind and focus harder.
Newt Scamander, to his credit, wasn't screaming. He was standing in the aisle gripping the overhead compartment with both hands, his ancient leather case clutched to his chest, his eyes wide but alert. When our gazes met, he gave me a sharp, knowing nod.
I looked out the window. Through the chaos of clouds and rushing air, I could see it below us. An island. Rocky, green, maybe two miles across. We were going to hit land, not water, which meant impact, fire, and absolutely zero chance of survival for anyone aboard this plane without intervention.
Twelve seconds. Maybe ten.
I closed my eyes. The Sitri magic crest burned to life across my right hand, flooding my veins with cold, familiar power. I reached out with my senses and felt every molecule of moisture in the cabin, in the walls, in the air recycling system, in every water bottle and coffee cup and beverage cart. I pulled it all toward me, gathering it like a breath, feeling the raw mass of it coalesce into my control.
Ice. I need ice.
I opened my eyes. My hands moved.
The temperature in the cabin plummeted so fast that the screaming stopped for half a second, replaced by gasps as every breath became visible fog. Frost crept across the windows, the walls, the floor. And then the ice came.
I built it outward from every passenger's seat in smooth, crystalline layers that encased their bodies in cocoons of solid, blue-white ice. Arms, legs, torsos, heads. Three hundred and twelve individual shells of frozen protection, each one thick enough to absorb catastrophic impact and insulate against temperatures that would melt steel.
The cockpit I left open. The pilots needed to do what they could until the very last second, and honestly, shielding them too would have stretched me past my limit. I was already pulling moisture from my own bloodstream to fill the gaps.
Five seconds.
I froze Jasmine. She didn't even flinch, just stared at me until the ice sealed over her face. Marlene went next, and I caught the ghost of a wild, trusting grin on her lips before the frost swallowed it. Asia was still praying when I covered her.
Newt raised his case in front of his face and nodded. I froze him solid.
Two seconds.
I threw everything I had left into my own shell, pulling it tight around my body like a second skin, layering it as thick as I could manage while my magic reserves screamed in protest. The blue glow of the Sitri crest was the last thing I saw before the ice sealed over my eyes.
KRRRSSHHHHHHHH-BOOOOOM!
The world spun. Tumbled. Slammed to a stop.
Then, slowly, the crackling of fire. The groaning of twisted metal. The hiss of steam where ice met burning fuel.
Am I alive?
I flexed my fingers inside the shell. Everything moved alright it seemed.
Yeah. I'm alive. Yay…
I shattered my own cocoon from the inside with a pulse of demonic energy. Blinding sunlight hit me and I squinted, raising one hand to shield my eyes while the other braced against what used to be the floor of first class and was now a crumpled sheet of aluminum tilted at a forty-degree angle.
The scene was apocalyptic. The plane had carved a massive furrow through the island's rocky terrain, leaving a crater maybe three hundred meters long and twenty meters deep. The fuselage was split into three sections, each one burning with bright orange jet fuel fires that sent columns of black smoke spiraling into the grey sky. Chunks of wing and engine housing were scattered across the hillside.
But the ice cocoons were intact.
Every single one. Through the shattered windows and torn walls of the fuselage, I could see them. Hundreds of blue-white shapes nestled among the wreckage like enormous frozen eggs, each one containing a living, hopefully breathing human being who should have been dead. Steam rose from their surfaces where the fire had licked at them, but the shells were thick. They'd hold for a while yet.
I stumbled through the wreckage to Jasmine first. Her cocoon had been thrown clear of the fuselage and was half-buried in a mound of churned earth. I pressed my palm against the ice and reversed the crystallization, pulling the cold back into myself. The shell dissolved in seconds, revealing Jasmine curled in a fetal position with her arms over her head, shivering violently.
"J-Jasmine. Hey. Open your eyes."
Her lashes fluttered behind her glasses. For a moment she just stared. Then her lower lip trembled. "Harry?" Her voice cracked. "Are we... did we..."
"We crashed. Everyone's alive. I need your help."
She blinked once, twice, and then the Gryffindor steel I'd come to admire slammed into place behind her eyes. She grabbed my offered hand and hauled herself up, pulling her wand from the holster strapped to her thigh under her jeans. "Tell me what to do."
"Fires first. I'll get your mum and Newt."
Marlene came out of her cocoon already moving, rolling to her feet with her wand in hand and her eyes scanning the burning crater with the cold assessment of a woman who'd survived a magical war. She didn't say a word. She just pointed her wand at the nearest pool of burning jet fuel and started casting.
Newt was shivering when I thawed him out, his teeth chattering so hard that his words came out in jabbers, but his eyes were bright with something that looked disturbingly like academic fascination. "Th-th-that," he stammered, pushing himself upright on shaking legs, "was the most r-remarkable display of emergency magic I have ever witnessed in over a century of fieldwork. The precision alone... to individually encase over three hundred subjects in protective crystalline structures while under extreme temporal pressure and simultaneous physical duress..." He shook his head in wonder. "Extraordinary. Truly extraordinary."
"Thanks," I said. "Can you help with the fires?"
"Oh! Yes, yes, of course." He pulled a wand that looked older than some countries and joined the effort.
I turned back to the wreckage and lowered my hand toward the nearest cluster of frozen cocoons. I reached out with my senses, feeling each shell, each heartbeat within, and began the slow, careful process of thawing them one by one. Pull the cold back. Dissolve the ice. Let the person breathe.
The first muggle to come out was a middle-aged businessman in a suit that had been expensive about fifteen minutes ago. He sat up in the rubble, patted his own chest like he couldn't believe it was solid, looked at the burning plane crash crater around him, looked at me, looked back at the crater, and said, very quietly, "What the fuck."
"You're safe," I told him. "Stay put."
"What the FUCK."
The next thirty muggles had approximately the same reaction. Some cried. Some screamed. One woman kissed the ground. A teenager pulled out his phone and started filming, which was going to be a massive problem later. An elderly couple emerged holding hands, and when they realized they were both alive, they started sobbing into each other's shoulders.
I kept thawing. One after another after another. Every shell I dissolved revealed another shocked, confused, shivering human being who had fully expected to be dead and could not for the life of them figure out why they were instead covered in a thin sheen of rapidly melting ice in the middle of a plane crash crater.
This is going to be the biggest Obliviate operation in modern wizarding history. And I am not handling it…
I thawed Asia second to last. The moment the ice cleared she launched herself at me so hard I had to brace my feet.
"Nnngh... you're okay," I said, catching her. "Everyone's okay."
"H-Harry-san," she hiccupped into my chest. "I prayed. I prayed so hard. It hurt but I didn't stop…"
"It worked," I told her gently, because honestly, who was I to argue with whatever got us through this. I set her down carefully behind a chunk of wing that shielded her from the worst of the smoke. "Stay here, okay? I'll come back for you."
She nodded.
I sighed and turned back to the crater. The fires were mostly out now. Marlene and Jasmine had handled the south end of the wreckage while Newt tackled the north, and between the three wands, the burning jet fuel had been reduced to scattered patches of smoldering residue. But the muggles were standing around in dazed clusters, some of them pointing at Marlene and Jasmine's wands, others staring at the ice still clinging to their clothes, and a few enterprising souls already on their phones trying to get a signal.
Three hundred witnesses. A plane crash on an uncharted island. Ice magic. Wands…
"I am not handling erasing all these memories," I muttered to myself. "Absolutely not. That is a Serafall problem. Or a Dumbledore problem. Or literally anyone's problem but mine."
"Harry!"
I turned. Marlene was striding toward me through the smoke and debris, her blonde hair wild around her face, soot smeared across one cheekbone, her crop top singed at the hem. She looked like she'd just walked off a battlefield rather than out of a plane crash, and she was smiling. She reached me and wrapped both arms around my neck, pulling me into a tight, crushing hug. Her body pressed flush against mine, soft and warm and alive, her breasts squeezing against my chest through the thin fabric of her top. I could feel her heartbeat hammering, fast and hard, and the faint tremor in her arms that said she'd been far more scared than she'd let anyone see.
"Marlene..." I started.
She kissed me. Marlene McKinnon grabbed the back of my head with one hand, tilted my jaw with the other, and kissed me with a slow, deliberate thoroughness that left absolutely no room for misinterpretation. Her lips were warm, and her tongue swept against mine in a long, unhurried stroke that made my hands tighten involuntarily on her waist. She pressed closer, arching into me, one hand sliding down to grip the front of my shirt, and she kissed me like she was memorizing the shape of my mouth.
"Mmh..." she hummed softly against my lips before pulling back just far enough to speak.
"Thank you," Marlene said, her voice low and steady and thick with emotion, "for saving my daughter's life. Again." Her dark eyes searched mine, and for a moment the flirtatious mask was completely gone, and I could see the mother underneath, the woman who would burn the world to ash before she let anything happen to Jasmine. "Thank you, Harry."
I felt my face go warm despite everything. "No problem," I said, which was possibly the lamest response in human history to a kiss that had just short-circuited half my brain.
Marlene grinned, and there it was. She patted my chest once and stepped back.
"MUM!" Jasmine was standing about ten feet away, wand in one hand, the other balled into a fist at her side, her face cycling through approximately seventeen shades of red. She looked like she wanted to scream, cry, and punch something simultaneously, and the way her eyes kept darting between her mother's smug face and my probably very stupid expression suggested she hadn't missed a single second of what just happened.
"What?" Marlene said innocently. "I was thanking the man who saved our lives."
"With your TONGUE?"
"Don't be dramatic, darling. It was barely any tongue."
"I SAW TONGUE, MOTHER." Jasmine's glare swung to me, and for one terrifying second I thought she was going to hex me. But then her expression softened into something more vulnerable, more conflicted, and I watched her jaw work as she clearly battled with herself. She wanted to kiss me too. It was written across her face as clearly as Gryffindor scarlet.
But three hundred confused muggles were staring at us from the crater, several of them filming on phones that hopefully had no signal, and Jasmine Potter-McKinnon was too proud and too stubborn to have her first real kiss with me documented by a bunch of traumatized strangers.
She settled for punching my arm. Hard.
"Ow."
"That's for letting her kiss you."
"Technically she kissed me. I was a passive participant."
"You had your hands on her waist!"
"...Force of habit?"
Jasmine made a sound somewhere between a growl and a squeak and turned on her heel, stomping back toward the wreckage with her wand raised, presumably to keep putting out fires so she didn't have to look at either of us.
Marlene watched her go with the fondest, most insufferably smug smile I'd ever seen on a human face. "She's going to jump you the second she gets you alone, you know. She's got her father's impatience."
"Marlene."
"Mmm?"
"Please stop."
"Never."
"Hehe." The quiet chuckle came from behind us. Newt Scamander stood a few paces back, his ancient leather case resting on the ground beside him, his lined face creased with warm amusement. His eyes twinkled behind his wind-whipped fringe of silver hair in a way that reminded me uncomfortably of Dumbledore. "Young love," he said, and the words carried the weight of someone who had lived long enough to treasure it wherever he found it. "Beautiful thing, really. Beautiful, terrifying, completely irrational thing."
"Mr. Scamander," I said.
"Newt, please. I think surviving a plane crash together entitles us to first names."
"Newt. We should probably get out of here."
His expression shifted instantly, the warmth replaced by sharp concern. He lifted one hand and pointed at the sky. "Yes, I rather agree. Because I believe our unfriendly neighborhood Thunderbird is the reason we crashed in the first place, and it appears to be circling back."
I looked up.
The clouds above the island had darkened from grey to near-black in the time we'd been on the ground, swirling in a slow, ominous rotation that looked far too deliberate to be natural weather. And there, cutting through the cloud bank in a wide, lazy arc, was a shape.
Massive. Easily a hundred and fifty feet wingspan. Dark plumage that crackled with veins of electricity, and the silhouette of a raptor so enormous it made the destroyed passenger jet look like a paper airplane. Its wings trailed arcs of black lightning that earthed against the clouds with deep, rolling booms, and its cry, when it came, was nothing like any bird I'd ever heard.
"SKREEEEEEEEEE!"
The sound hit with a sonic shockwave. Muggles clapped their hands over their ears and ducked. Several children started crying. The smoldering remains of the jet fuel reignited in scattered patches as the lightning-charged air passed overhead.
"That's... big," I said.
"Quite," Newt agreed. "She's been spotted over four continents in the last month. Largest Thunderbird ever recorded. And, if my hypothesis is correct, she's currently experiencing an unprecedented surge in her core magical energy that's made her volatile, territorial, and very, very angry."
"She took down our plane?"
"Almost certainly. Thunderbirds generate electromagnetic fields powerful enough to disable muggle electronics. In her current state, she likely knocked out both engines simultaneously from several miles away without even meaning to."
"SKREEEEEEEEEEEE!"
The Thunderbird banked sharply, and the clouds split open beneath it. Rain began to fall. Not gentle rain. Driving, horizontal rain that stung exposed skin and immediately soaked everyone in the crater.
"She's coming around again," Newt said urgently. He pulled a worn broomstick from inside his case, which should not have been physically possible but was apparently standard Scamander luggage, and tapped it with his wand. The broom unshrunk to full size in his hands. "I can lead her away if she follows me, but if she doesn't..."
"She's after us," I said, the realization clicking into place. The Thunderbird hadn't just happened to knock out a random plane. She'd targeted us specifically.
I wonder why?
I looked at Marlene and Jasmine, both of whom had stopped putting out fires and were now staring up at the enormous bird with expressions that mixed awe and alarm in roughly equal measure.
"Harry, what do we do?" Jasmine called out with her wand raised, and the rain plastering her dark hair to her face.
I crossed the distance to the two McKinnon women in three long strides, wrapped my right arm around Marlene's waist and my left around Jasmine's, and pulled them both against me. Marlene let out a surprised "Oof!" as her body collided with my side, and Jasmine made a high-pitched sound she would absolutely deny later, but neither of them pulled away.
"Hold on," I said. "Tight."
My devil wings burst from my back in a rush of dark energy, spreading wide behind me, the membrane catching the rain. Both women instinctively tightened their grip. Marlene's arms locked around my neck. Jasmine buried her face against my shoulder and grabbed fistfuls of my shirt.
I turned my head toward Newt, who was already mounting his unshrunk broom with that calm, weathered efficiency of a man who'd probably ridden through worse than a plane crash in his crazy life.
"Newt, can you get Asia?" I called out over the driving rain. "I've got my hands full."
"Oh, almost certainly," Newt said without a shred of hesitation. He angled the broom toward where Asia was huddled behind the chunk of wing debris. He brought the broom to a gentle hover beside her and extended one weathered hand with the kind of grandfatherly warmth that could put a startled unicorn at ease. "Come now, dear. Up you go. Right behind me, if you please."
Asia stared at the broom, then at Newt, then at the broom again. Her lower lip wobbled. "I... I've never been on a..."
"Perfectly safe, I assure you." Newt patted the broom handle like it was a beloved family pet. "I've flown through monsoons, volcanic updrafts, and once through the interior of a dragon's open mouth, though that last one was admittedly not planned. A bit of rain is nothing. And a Saintess of your caliber would never come to any harm under my watch."
Asia's enormous blue eyes went even wider. "You... you know who I am?"
"My dear girl, of course I do." Newt's smile deepened, crinkling the weathered lines around his eyes. "My wife Tina suffered a rather nasty mauling from a Nundu we were tracking through the Roman countryside, oh, must have been three years ago now. Terrible business. Paralytic venom, necrotic tissue damage, the works. The local magical hospital was completely out of its depth. But a young nun from a nearby church came to visit the ward, and she laid her hands on Tina's wounds and healed them completely. Bones, tissue, venom, all of it. Gone. Just like that." He looked at Asia with genuine, quiet reverence. "That was you."
Asia blinked rapidly and was processing. "I... I've healed so many people over the years, Mr. Newt. Hundreds. I'm sorry I can't remember every single one." Her voice was small and a little sad, like she genuinely felt guilty about not keeping a perfect mental catalog of every person her Sacred Gear had ever touched. Then her expression brightened into something sweet and warm. "But I'm really, really glad I was able to help your wife. Is she okay now?"
"Fit as a fiddle and twice as stubborn," Newt chuckled. "Went right back to chasing dangerous creatures the following week. I couldn't stop her if I tried. You gave me more years with the woman I love, Miss Argento. That's not the sort of thing a man forgets."
Asia's eyes glistened with fresh tears, but these were the good kind. She sniffled once and took his hand. Newt pulled her onto the broom behind him with surprising strength for his age, and she wrapped her free arm around his midsection.
"Awwww." The soft, thoroughly charmed coo came from the woman currently pressed against my right side with her arms locked around my neck. Marlene was watching the whole exchange with her head tilted and her blue eyes glowing with that particular warmth mothers get when they see something pure and good happening in the world. "That is the most precious thing I've seen all week," she said. "That old man is adorable. I want to adopt him."
"You want to adopt a hundred-and-thirty-year-old magizoologist?"
"Absolutely. He can be Jasmine's grandfather…"
"I'm good thanks…" Jasmine huffed out on my other side. "Although, I would love to talk to a famous man like him when we all aren't being chased by a giant murder bird… Your life is insane, Harry."
I turned and gave her a pout because how was this MY fault!?
She just stuck her tongue out at me playfully and then buried her head in my shoulder. I adjusted my grip on both women, making sure I had them secure. Marlene was tucked against my right side, her arms looped around my neck, her body warm and soft against mine. Jasmine was pressed to my left, her face buried in my shoulder, both fists knotted in the fabric of my shirt so tightly that I was fairly sure she was going to rip it.
"Hold on," I said again.
I crouched, spread my wings wide, and launched us skyward.
Jasmine made a sound like "Nnnngh!" and pressed herself so hard against my side that I could feel every curve of her body through our soaking clothes. Her thighs clenched around my hip as she instinctively tried to anchor herself.
"This is fulfilling a lot of my schoolgirl fantasies I had back in my Hogwart's days," Marlene said from the other side. Then she hugged me tighter and let out an almost breathy moan.
Focus. Giant bird. Stop thinking about how good both of them feel pressed against you.
Below us, the crater was shrinking fast. The muggles had completely lost whatever collective grip on reality they'd been maintaining since waking up frozen in a plane crash. From up here, their screams were faint, but I could still make out the gist.
"DID YOU SEE THAT?! HE HAS WINGS!"
"IT'S A DEMON! A DEMON CRASHED THE PLANE!"
"HE'S KIDNAPPING THOSE WOMEN! SOMEONE CALL THE POLICE!"
"CALL THE ARMY!"
"CALL THE POPE!"
"WHY WAS I FROZEN? WHY WAS EVERYONE FROZEN? WHAT IS HAPPENING?"
A woman fainted. Two men started fistfighting over a phone. An elderly gentleman fell to his knees and began reciting the Lord's Prayer at maximum volume.
That last one stung, and I was at least glad Asia didn't start joining in.
I sighed so deeply my entire body deflated mid-flight. "I save three hundred and twelve people from a fiery death, and the first thing they do is accuse me of crashing the plane and abducting women."
"To be fair," Marlene said against my neck, her breath warm on my rain-chilled skin, "you do have very kidnap-y looking wings."
"They're nice wings!"
"They're evil devil wings, darling..."
The storm clouds were thickening overhead. Every few seconds, a bolt of that pitch-dark lightning would land against the ocean or the island's rocky peaks with a deep, resonant boom.
And there she was.
The Thunderbird emerged from the cloudbank maybe half a mile above us, her silhouette enormous against the charcoal sky. She was even bigger than she'd looked from the ground. A hundred and fifty feet of dark plumage, talons the size of cars. She turned her head, fixed us with one of those burning eyes, and screamed.
"SKREEEEEEEEEEEEEE!"
Marlene winced hard but kept her arms locked around my neck. Behind and below us, I could see Newt's broom gaining altitude as the old magizoologist climbed to match our position, Asia clinging to his back with her face pressed into his coat.
The Thunderbird banked, folded her wings, and dove straight at us.
"INCOMING!" I roared, and threw myself into a hard banking turn to the right. The wind sheared across my wings and both women screamed, Marlene with a kind of wild excitement and Jasmine with undiluted terror, as I barrel-rolled us out of the Thunderbird's dive path. The massive bird shot past us close enough that the turbulence from her wings sent us tumbling.
"Harry!" Newt's voice cut through the wind. He'd pulled his broom alongside us, Asia tucked behind him, and he was pointing to the northeast where, through the sheets of rain, I could just make out another landmass. A smaller island, rocky and barren, maybe two miles out. "There! Uninhabited! If we can get down there, I can attempt to calm her! Thunderbirds respond to environmental magic and submission displays! I've done it before with a juvenile in Arizona!"
"That was a juvenile!" I shouted back with the rain lashing my face. "This thing is the size of a football pitch!"
"Same principles apply! Mostly! Probably!"
"Probably?!"
"I don't think it's going to be that easy," Jasmine said. Her voice was steadier now. The initial shock of flight had worn off, and the Gryffindor in her was taking over. She'd turned in my arm, one hand still gripping my shirt, the other raised to shield her eyes from the rain as she tracked the Thunderbird's circling approach. "She's herding us. Look at the pattern. She makes a wide pass, then tightens. She's pushing us toward that smaller island."
She was right. Every banking turn the Thunderbird made compressed the airspace between us and the barren rocky outcrop Newt had pointed out. Whether by instinct or intelligence, the creature was funneling us exactly where the old magizoologist wanted to go.
Fine. If that's where she wants us, that's where we'll go. At least there aren't three hundred muggles with camera phones over there.
"Newt!" I called through the rain. "She's driving us northeast! We go with it! Touch down fast and get behind cover!"
"Agreed!" Newt banked his broom sharply, and Asia let out a frightened squeak against his back.
A bolt of black lightning split the sky maybe forty feet to our left. The thunderclap was so close and so violent that it rattled my teeth and sent a jolt of static crawling across my wings. Marlene hissed through her clenched jaw and pressed tighter against me. Jasmine made a choked sound and buried her face in my neck, her fingers digging into my shoulders hard enough to bruise even through devil durability.
Down. Now. Before we get struck.
I folded my wings into a steep dive, angling us toward the smaller island. The rocky terrain rushed up to meet us, grey stone and scraggly patches of wind-beaten grass, a landscape so barren it looked like the earth had given up trying. Another black bolt crackled past us on the right, so close I could feel the hair on my arms stand straight up and smell the sharp, metallic tang of ozone.
"SKREEEEEEEEE!"
The Thunderbird screamed again from somewhere above and behind us, the shockwave punching into my back. My wings stuttered. Marlene's grip slipped for one heart-stopping instant before I clamped my arm tighter around her waist and pulled her back against me.
"I've got you," I said through gritted teeth. "I've got you."
"Never doubted it for a second, darling," Marlene managed, though her voice was shaking for the first time.
The ground came up fast. I flared my wings at the last possible moment, bleeding off speed in a controlled stall that still hit harder than I wanted. My shoes cracked against bare rock, the impact jolting up through my legs, and I stumbled forward two steps before planting myself. Marlene and Jasmine both gasped as the sudden deceleration whipped through their bodies, but I held them upright. Barely.
"Down!" I barked, releasing them both. "Get behind me!"
Jasmine scrambled off my left side, her legs wobbly, her face white but her wand already up. Marlene peeled off my right with more grace, rolling her shoulders once and snapping into a combat stance of a war veteran. Both of them backed up quickly, putting me between them and the sky.
Newt touched down to our right, his landing considerably smoother on the broom. Asia half-fell, half-climbed off the back, her legs giving out the second her feet hit solid ground.
"H-Harry-san..." Asia's voice was small and trembling as she crawled over toward me on her hands and knees, settling just behind my legs. She looked up at me with those enormous, watery green eyes. "Are we going to be okay?"
I reached down and rested my hand on the top of her head, smoothing her soaked hair back from her face. "Of course we are," I said, and I put every ounce of warmth and certainty I had into it. "I didn't save everyone on that plane just to let a big chicken finish the job."
Asia blinked. Then, impossibly, she smiled. It was small and wobbly and fragile, but it was real, and it reached her eyes. "Okay," she whispered. "I believe you."
I gave her head one more gentle pat and turned my eyes back to the sky.
Newt was already stepping forward, planting himself ahead of our group on the flat expanse of bare rock. He set his leather case down carefully, straightened his rain-soaked coat, and pulled something from an inner pocket. A bundle of dried herbs that smoked faintly despite the downpour, held together with silver thread. His wand went into his other hand, and his posture shifted.
"Everyone stay perfectly still," Newt said. "I'm going to attempt a submission display combined with a calming resonance. Thunderbirds are proud, intelligent creatures. If she perceives dominance combined with peaceful intent, her instinct should be to assess rather than attack. Just let me handle thi..."
BOOOOOOM.
The Thunderbird hit the island like a meteor. Pulverized stone erupted outward from the point of impact maybe sixty meters in front of us, sending a wall of dust and debris rolling across the barren landscape. I threw one arm up to shield my face. Behind me, Jasmine and Marlene both staggered, and Asia yelped and grabbed onto the back of my leg with both arms.
"WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK!" Jasmine shouted, bracing herself against a jutting slab of rock as the tremor rolled through the island like a small earthquake. Her eyes were locked on the massive shape now settling in the crater of its own landing.
It was bigger on the ground. So, so much bigger.
The Thunderbird's body alone was the size of a commercial airliner.
"That is NOT a normal Thunderbird," Marlene said flatly, her wand raised, her knuckles white. "I've seen Thunderbirds. I studied them in bloody Care of Magical Creatures. They're big, sure, but they're like... double eagle sized. Maybe triple. NOT..." She gestured wildly at the kaiju in front of us. "NOT WHATEVER THE FUCK THAT IS."
"Language," Jasmine muttered automatically, which earned her an incredulous look from her mother.
"Your mother will say fuck as many times as she likes when there's a bird the size of Gringotts parked sixty meters away, Jasmine."
"Sitri Bank," I corrected without thinking.
"Oh, piss off. You're just as cheeky as your mother, Lily, sometimes…"
Newt, to his monumental credit, hadn't flinched at any of our banter. He stood at the front of our group with his herb bundle raised, the silver-threaded smoke curling upward into the rain, and began a series of slow, deliberate movements. Bowing low at the waist. Turning his palms outward. Holding eye contact. Making a series of low, resonant clicking sounds from deep in his throat that I assumed were his version of Thunderbird language. His wand traced a gentle pattern in the air, releasing waves of pale green calming magic that rolled across the wet stone toward the creature.
The Thunderbird watched him.
Her massive head tilted to one side, those burning eyes tracking every movement Newt made with an unsettling level of comprehension. For a few heartbeats, I thought it might actually work. The creature's wing feathers settled slightly. The black lightning arcing between them dimmed.
Then she dismissed Newt entirely.
Her gaze shifted past the old magizoologist like he wasn't even there and locked directly onto me. The burning eyes narrowed. The black lightning flared back to full intensity, crawling across her plumage in violent, branching arcs. And then her beak opened.
Fuck.
I moved before the thought finished forming. My Sitri crest blazed to life across my right hand, cold blue light cutting through the rain, and I threw both palms forward. Every drop of rain falling between us and the Thunderbird froze in midair, condensed, compressed, and slammed together into a wall of solid water twenty feet high and three feet thick. Dense, heavy, reinforced with every scrap of demonic energy I could pump into it on zero notice.
The Thunderbird's beak crashed into the wall like a battering ram.
CRRRAAASH!
The impact sent a shockwave through the barrier that I felt in my bones. Cracks spiderwebbed through the water wall, fragments of pressurized liquid spraying outward.
Asia screamed. Jasmine shouted something I didn't catch. Marlene cursed loudly and creatively in a way that confirmed where Jasmine got her Gryffindor vocabulary from.
My boots slid back six inches on the wet rock from the transmitted force alone, and my arms shook with the effort of holding the barrier together.
But it held.
The beak withdrew, leaving a massive indentation in the water wall. Through the semi-transparent barrier, I could see the Thunderbird pulling back, shaking her enormous head like she was dazed from the impact. Good. If she thought she could just snap us up like field mice, she had another thing coming.
Okay. Plan A was "let the expert handle it." Plan A just failed spectacularly. Plan B is me.
The wall dropped. Water and slushy ice crashed to the stone in a massive splash that drenched everyone behind me. I barely noticed. Because now, with the barrier gone and the Thunderbird rearing back barely thirty meters away, I could see her clearly. Every detail. Every feather. Every crackling arc of that pitch-black lightning.
There was cold, wrong, void-like power threaded through the Thunderbird's natural magic like a parasite. I'd felt this exact signature before, in Kuoh, wrapped around Saji's corrupted Sacred Gear.
A spear of razor-sharp ice formed in my right hand, long as a javelin and dense enough to punch through tank armor. My left hand stayed open, palm forward, gathering the rain into a swirling vortex of pressurized water that hummed with barely contained force.
The Thunderbird shrieked and lunged.
I threw the ice spear first. It crossed the distance in a blur and slammed into the creature's shoulder joint with a sound like a cannon shot, punching through three layers of magically reinforced feathers and burying itself a foot deep in muscle. The Thunderbird screamed, that awful sound reverberating across the island, and one wing spasmed, scattering arcs of black lightning in every direction.
A bolt struck the ground ten feet to my left and blew a chunk of rock the size of a car into the air.
I fired the water jet next, a focused beam of compressed liquid moving at twice the speed of sound. It caught the Thunderbird across the face, shearing away feathers and drawing a line of bright red blood across the bridge of her enormous beak. She recoiled with a deafening scream, her head whipping to the side, and I pressed the advantage.
Another ice spear formed. Launched. Hit the base of her neck and shattered against the denser plumage there, but the impact staggered her. A third spear. This one I curved in mid-flight, bending its trajectory with my magic so it circled around her defensive wing and punched into the meat of her thigh.
"SKREEEEEEEEE!"
The Thunderbird's retaliatory strike came as a concentrated blast of black lightning fired directly from her open beak. I threw up another water wall, but this time the bolt punched straight through it, the void-tainted energy disrupting my magic on contact. I had to physically dive to the side, hitting the wet rock and rolling as the lightning strike cratered the ground where I'd been standing half a second earlier.
The shockwave caught me mid-roll and sent me tumbling. I was back on my feet in an instant, a fresh vortex of water already swirling around my left arm, two more ice spears forming behind my shoulders in midair.
"Newt!" I shouted over the chaos without looking back. "Any more bright ideas?!"
The old magizoologist's voice came from behind me, and it carried sadness. "I'm afraid..." Newt's voice cracked. He cleared his throat and tried again, louder this time, but the sadness in it was unmistakable. "I'm afraid this magnificent creature may be too far gone, Harry. Whatever has been done to her... that black energy... it's not natural. It's corrupting her from the inside out. Her core magic is being consumed by it. Even if we subdue her, I don't know if there's enough of the original Thunderbird left to save."
The Thunderbird was recovering. I could see it shaking that massive head, slinging blood and rainwater in wide arcs from the wounds I'd carved across its beak. The ice spear still jutted from its shoulder like a toothpick buried in a mountain of dark feathers, and those burning eyes were already refocusing on me with that terrible, singular intensity.
Good. You want me? You've got me. Just keep looking at me, you overgrown pigeon.
"Jasmine!" I shouted over my shoulder without taking my eyes off the creature. "Take Marlene, Asia, and Newt and get deeper into the island! Find caves, rock overhangs, anything solid! Get underground if you can!"
"Are you out of your bloody mind?!" Jasmine's voice cracked. I heard her boots scraping against wet stone as she moved forward instead of back. "I am NOT leaving you alone with that thing, Harry!"
"Jasmine, listen to me." I kept my voice level, controlled, even though every instinct in my body was screaming at me to launch myself at the Thunderbird before it finished recovering. "Your magic can't hurt this creature. If you stay here, all you do is give me something else to worry about, and worrying about you while I'm fighting a kaiju is how I get killed."
I knew the words had landed exactly the way I'd intended, which was to say, they landed like a punch to the gut. I wasn't trying to be cruel. I was trying to keep her alive. There's a difference, even if it doesn't feel like one when you're on the receiving end.
"He's right, Jasmine." Marlene's voice cut through the tension. I heard her grab Jasmine's arm. "We go. Now."
"Mum, I can't just..."
"You can and you will." Marlene's tone left absolutely zero room for negotiation. Then, louder, directed at me: "Harry."
I turned my head just enough to catch her blue eyes.
She stood in the driving rain with her wand in one hand and her daughter's arm in the other, blonde hair plastered to her face, soot still streaked across her cheekbone from the plane crash. And yet she was still gorgeous. "You'd better not die," she said, her voice low and steady and fierce. "I haven't finished with you yet~"
Despite everything, despite the kaiju sixty meters away and the black lightning splitting the sky, I felt the corner of my mouth twitch upward. "Wouldn't dream of it..."
Marlene held my gaze for one more beat. Then she turned and started pulling Jasmine toward the interior of the island.
My newest pawn Asia was already on her feet, stumbling after them on shaky legs. She paused just long enough to look back at me with those enormous, glistening green eyes. "I'll pray for you, Harry-san," she whispered.
The faint sting of holy energy prickled across my skin and I winced. "I appreciate the thought, Asia. Really. But maybe just... think positive thoughts instead? The prayer keeps hurting you and I don't like seeing you hurt…."
"Oh…" she mumbled. I think it finally clicked for her that she was a devil now and not human anymore. "Then I'll think the best happy thoughts I can!" she finished with a bright smile regardless. She went, hurrying after Marlene and Jasmine, nearly tripping over a rock before catching herself and scrambling onward.
Newt was the last. The old magizoologist stood his ground for a long, reluctant moment, staring past me at the Thunderbird with an expression that was equal parts scientific fascination and deep, genuine grief. His ancient leather case was clutched to his chest like a lifeline.
Newt studied me for a moment. Whatever he saw in my face seemed to satisfy him, because he gave a slow, solemn nod. He left without saying anything else.
I watched them go for exactly two seconds, long enough to confirm they were moving, long enough to commit the image of Jasmine's dark hair disappearing behind a ridge of grey stone to memory.
Then I turned back to the Thunderbird.
She had stopped shaking her head. Those burning, hate-filled eyes were locked on me again, and the black lightning crawling across her plumage had intensified, arcing and snapping between her wing feathers in violent, branching chains that lit up the storm-dark sky in stuttering flashes.
She knew I'd sent the others away. She didn't care. I was the one she wanted.
Alright. Just you and me then, big girl.
My devil wings spread wide behind me, the dark membrane snapping taut in the gale-force wind. Rain streamed off the leading edges and the gusts tried to push me sideways, but I planted my feet, bent my knees, and launched myself into the air with enough force to crack the stone I'd been standing on.
The ground fell away. The rain hit harder at altitude, driving into my face like needles, and the wind up here was a living, howling thing that wanted to spin me like a leaf. But my wings were strong and I'd been training with them for months, learning to fly in conditions that would ground most devils twice my age. I angled upward, climbing fast, getting above the Thunderbird's eye level so I could dive at her rather than charge head-on into that lightning-spewing beak.
And for one brief, utterly inappropriate moment, as the absurdity of what I was about to do crashed over me, my mind flashed to my mother.
Mum is going to be absolutely devastated that she is missing this. I'm about to fight a literal kaiju on a deserted island and there isn't a single camera within a thousand miles. No film crew. No dramatic lighting. No background music. Magical Girl Levia-tan versus the Giant Lightning Bird would have been the highest-rated episode in the show's history. She'd have wanted six camera angles, slow-motion replays, and at least three costume changes mid-battle…
I could picture her face when I told her about this. The way her blue eyes would go wide and glassy with tears of pure, theatrical anguish. The way she'd grab my shoulders and shake me while wailing about missed opportunities and once-in-a-lifetime footage. The way she'd immediately start planning a recreation of the fight using magical special effects and insist I play myself.
Actually, knowing her, she'd try to recruit the Thunderbird as a recurring villain for Season 19.
"SKREEEEEEEEEE!" The creature's scream snapped me back to reality like a slap across the face. Right. Giant corrupted murder bird. Focus.
The Thunderbird's beak opened and another concentrated blast of black lightning erupted from its throat, a crackling beam of void-tainted energy that tore through the rain and turned every droplet in its path to steam.
I threw myself into a hard barrel roll, tucking my wings tight against my body and spinning on my center of gravity. The bolt screamed past me so close that the residual energy scorched a line of fire across my left forearm and the side of my neck.
I hissed through clenched teeth as the pain registered. I pulled out of the barrel roll, straightened my trajectory, and closed the distance.
The Thunderbird tracked me, turning that enormous head to follow my approach, beak opening again for another blast. But I was faster now, driven by adrenaline and fury and the memory of what that same dark corruption had done to Saji Genshirou in a park in Kuoh.
That was the key. That was what my mind kept circling back to.
When I fought Saji, he was juiced up on this exact same void energy. That black armor he'd manifested, the power boost, the corrupted Balance Breaker. It was the same signature. The same parasite. And what had burned through it like it wasn't even there?
The Veela fire.
If this Thunderbird is infected with the same darkness, then I already know what kills it.
Passion, desire, the fierce burning need to protect what was mine and destroy what threatened it. Pink flames ignited in both my palms.
The Thunderbird saw the fire. Those burning eyes widened, and for the first time, I saw something other than rage in them. I saw fear. Maybe its animal instincts were warning it, but it was too late for that now…
The Thunderbird opened its beak to fire another lightning blast.
I threw first.
Both fireballs launched from my palms with everything I had behind them. Time seemed to stretch as I watched them close the distance, thirty meters, twenty, ten...
They hit.
One in each eye.
BOOOOM. BOOOOM.
The Thunderbird reeled backward, its massive head thrashing wildly from side to side as the pink flames devoured the corrupted tissue of both ruined eyes. Streams of dark ichor poured from the ruptured sockets, hissing and steaming where they hit the rain-soaked stone below, and the void energy that had been crackling through the creature's plumage flickered and stuttered like a dying lightbulb wherever the Veela fire touched it.
I can't believe that actually worked.
I hovered in the driving rain, chest heaving, my palms still smoking with residual pink flame, and watched the largest magical creature I had ever encountered in my life stumble blindly across the barren island like a drunk the size of a cathedral. Each staggering step cratered the stone beneath its talons. Each swing of its enormous head sent gale-force winds rippling outward that nearly knocked me out of the sky.
It worked. It actually worked. I just blinded a kaiju with the power of lust and passion. Somewhere out there, a Veela ancestor is either very proud or very confused…
But the celebration lasted approximately half a second, because a blind Thunderbird turned out to be significantly more dangerous than a sighted one.
The creature's beak opened and a raw, anguished shriek tore across the island with enough force to physically push me backward through the air. .
"SKRRREEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAGH!"
My wings flared wide to compensate, catching me before I tumbled, and then the lightning started.
Not targeted. Not aimed. Just everywhere.
CRACK. CRACK. CRACK-CRACK-CRACK.
Bolts of black lightning erupted from the Thunderbird's body in every direction simultaneously, earthing against the stone, the sea, the sky, anything and everything within range. The island lit up in strobing flashes of violet-black energy that turned the driving rain into a curtain of sparks. A bolt struck the ridge where I'd sent the others running and blew twenty feet of solid rock into gravel. Another hit the ocean fifty meters offshore and sent a geyser of superheated steam rocketing skyward.
Shit shit shit shit shit.
I threw myself into a dive, tucking my wings and dropping altitude as a bolt screamed through the space I'd occupied a heartbeat earlier.
The Thunderbird beat its wings.
Even blinded, even in agony, the sheer physical power of that motion was staggering. The downdraft hit me like a wall of compressed air and I tumbled, spinning end over end, my wings useless in the turbulence. Rocks the size of footballs were torn from the island's surface and flung skyward. Entire patches of scraggly, wind-beaten grass ripped free and disintegrated in the maelstrom. A chunk of stone the size of a desk clipped my left wing and I felt the membrane tear, a white-hot lance of pain shooting through the limb.
I crashed into the ground hard enough to bounce, skidded across wet rock on my back for ten meters, and came to a stop against a jutting slab of basalt that cracked under the impact.
Ow. Ow. Fucking ow.
I rolled onto my stomach and pushed myself up. My left wing hung at an angle that didn't look right, a ragged tear running through the membrane about a third of the way from the tip. It hurt like someone had taken a serrated knife to the inside of my shoulder blade.
The Thunderbird beat its wings again, and another avalanche of shattered rock cascaded across the island. The creature was turning in a slow, blind circle, its destroyed eyes weeping trails of dark fluid and dying pink fire, its beak snapping open and shut with bone-crushing force as it searched for me by sound and magical sense alone. Each step shook the ground. Each wingbeat kicked up a storm of debris that turned the air into a blender of stone fragments and horizontal rain.
I blinded it. Great. Wonderful. Ten points to Gryffindor. But it's still the size of a building and it's turning this entire island into a lightning rod. I can throw ice spears at it all day and it'll barely notice. The Veela fire works, but I need to get it deeper. Into the muscle, into the core, where that corruption is rooted.
I needed to get the fire inside the creature.
The thought formed with a clarity that cut through the pain. The Veela fire burned the void energy on contact. If I could get that fire deeper, past the feathers and the hide and the muscle, into the creature's actual magical core where the parasite had taken root...
But how? Its hide is magically reinforced. My ice spears barely penetrate. The fire works on exposed tissue, but I can't exactly ask her to hold still while I perform surgery with passionate pink flames.
Another bolt of black lightning struck the ground fifteen feet to my right and I threw myself flat, feeling the shockwave ripple through my chest. Gravel peppered my back. My torn wing throbbed with every heartbeat.
Think, Harry. Where is there exposed tissue? Where is the inside of a creature directly accessible from the outside?
The Thunderbird screamed again, that awful, anguished sound, and her beak gaped wide. Wide enough to swallow a car. Wide enough to see the cavernous darkness of her throat stretching back into the massive body, lined with soft, unarmored flesh that pulsed with veins of that sickly black corruption.
Oh.
Oh no.
That's a terrible idea. That is genuinely one of the worst ideas I have ever had, and I once let my mother talk me into performing a live-action magical girl romance scene on national devil television.
The Thunderbird's head swung in my direction, following the residual magical signature of my last attack. Her ruined eyes wept dark ichor and flickering pink embers. Her beak opened wider, drawing in air with a massive, rattling inhalation that I could feel pulling at my clothes and hair from thirty meters away, preparing another lightning blast from her throat.
She's about to fire. The beak is open. The throat is right there. If I go in now, right now, while she's charging...
This is so stupid. This is the stupidest thing I've ever done. Sona is going to kill me. Hermione is going to kill me. Mum is going to cry for three days straight and then kill me. Narcissa will write a formal letter of disapproval and then also kill me. Even Tonks, who laughs at everything, will not laugh at this.
My Queen, Lilja, will probably just nod and say "good choice" because she's a Valkyrie and they apparently respect suicidal bravery.
I stopped thinking.
My torn wing screamed in protest as I launched myself off the ground, but I ignored it, pouring demonic energy into the damaged membrane to hold it together for just a few more seconds. The rain slashed at my face. The wind tried to shove me sideways. A stray bolt of lightning crackled past my right ear close enough to singe my black hair and I didn't flinch, didn't deviate, didn't slow down.
I flew straight at the Thunderbird's open mouth.
"SKREEEEE" The creature sensed me coming. Her blind, ruined head turned to track the approaching magical signature, the building lightning in her throat flickering as her animal brain tried to process why her prey was flying directly toward her jaws instead of away from them.
Yeah, I'm confused about it too.
Twenty meters. Ten. Five.
The beak started to close. Instinct or intelligence, the Thunderbird was trying to snap shut on me like a trap.
I folded my wings flat against my back and shot through the narrowing gap like a bullet.
Inside the mouth of a kaiju.
I'm inside the mouth of a kaiju. I am literally inside the mouth of a kaiju. This is happening. This is my life now…
The darkness was near-total, the only light coming from the veins of black corruption that pulsed through the flesh around me like a diseased nervous system, casting everything in a sickly violet glow. The air was thick, wet, and unbearably hot, reeking of ozone and decaying magic and something organic that made my stomach heave. The tongue beneath my feet was muscular and slick, already convulsing as the creature's body registered the intruder.
I could feel the lightning building again. The charge in the air was making every hair on my body stand upright, and deep in the throat ahead of me, I could see the gathering point where the void energy was condensing into another concentrated blast. If she fired now, with me inside the barrel of the gun...
Don't think about that. Just do it.
I raised both arms, palms forward, fingers spread, and summoned the Veela fire.
It answered me like it had been waiting, the passionate pink flames roaring to life across both hands and racing up my forearms, brighter and fiercer than I'd ever conjured them. The darkness of the Thunderbird's maw was obliterated in an instant, replaced by blazing, brilliant pink light that illuminated every fold of corrupted flesh, every pulsing vein of void energy, every inch of the massive throat stretching away into the creature's core.
"Let's see how you like it from the inside!" I roared, and the acoustics of the cavernous mouth made my voice boom and echo like I was shouting into a cathedral.
I fired.
Both arms. Full power. No restraint, no finesse, no careful rationing of my reserves. Just twin streams of Veela fire pouring from my palms like flamethrowers, blazing pink torrents that hit the back of the Thunderbird's throat and exploded outward in cascading waves of purifying flame.
The effect was immediate and violent.
The corrupted flesh ignited like kindling. The void energy woven through the tissue burned away in curling, blackening strips, the pink fire chasing the corruption through the Thunderbird's internal structure with the relentless hunger of a wildfire finding dry brush. I could see it spreading, racing along the network of dark veins, turning the sickly violet glow to brilliant, searing pink as it burned the parasite out of the creature from the inside.
The Thunderbird's entire body convulsed.
The motion threw me off my feet. I slammed into the roof of the mouth, then the floor, then a wall of cheek tissue that compressed around me like a fist before the creature's jaw spasmed open again. I kept firing. Both hands, continuous streams, pouring everything I had into the flames even as the world around me bucked and heaved and tried to crush me flat.
"SKRREEEEEAAAAAAAGH!" The scream came from everywhere at once, transmitted through the flesh surrounding me with a bone-rattling intensity that made my teeth ache and my vision blur. The Thunderbird was thrashing, I could feel it, the violent jerking of its head, the frantic beating of its wings sending tremors through its entire body. Each convulsion slammed me into a different surface, the tongue, the palate, the inner cheek, but I locked my legs around the nearest ridge of tissue and held on with every ounce of devil strength I possessed.
I screamed and pushed harder, the flames roaring brighter, the pink light so intense now that even with my eyes squeezed shut I could see it through my eyelids!
…Did I pass out?
That was my first coherent thought as consciousness slowly seeped back into my brain like water through a cracked dam. My second thought was that something soft was poking my cheek. Repeatedly. With gentle but insistent pressure.
Poke. Poke. Poke.
I opened my eyes.
The sky above me was grey and heavy with rain clouds, but the rain itself had stopped. Smoke drifted lazily across my field of vision, carrying the acrid smell of burned... something. Burned feathers. Burned kaiju.
Poke.
I turned my head toward the sensation and found myself staring directly at the one of the most beautiful faces I had ever seen.
She was squatting on the charred ground next to me, one delicate finger extended to prod my cheek. Her face was perfect in that unsettling way that bypassed "attractive" and landed somewhere in "mathematically impossible." Flawless pale skin and delicate pink lips. Large, dark eyes that were so black they seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it. Long, flowing hair the color of midnight that pooled around her slim body. She couldn't have been more than five feet tall, with a figure that was slender—and yet she also could have easily fit in with my yearmates at Hogwarts.
And she had elf ears.
Actual, pointed, honest-to-Satan elf ears that poked through her dark hair and curved to delicate tips.
Also, the way she was squatting...
My eyes, operating entirely on autopilot and male instinct, tracked downward before my brain could stop them. She was wearing a simple pink dress, and the position she'd chosen to wait in had caused the hem to ride up her pale thighs in a way that left absolutely nothing to the imagination.
She wasn't wearing panties.
I was looking directly at a perfectly bare, pink, and frankly exquisite pussy belonging to a mysterious elf-eared woman who had apparently been poking my face while I lay unconscious next to the burning corpse of a kaiju I'd killed from the inside.
My face went hot so fast I was genuinely surprised steam didn't rise from my rain-soaked skin.
The girl noticed I was awake. Those bottomless black eyes met mine, and her expression didn't change at all. No embarrassment about the view she was giving me. No reaction to my obvious blush. Just calm, blank observation.
"Hello," she said. Her voice was soft and almost entirely monotone, carrying no inflection whatsoever. It should have sounded robotic or unsettling. Instead, it was strangely... soothing? Like the voice of something so ancient and powerful that it had simply forgotten how to pretend at human emotion.
I sat up quickly, both to get my eyes away from her exposed lower half and to assess my situation. The motion brought a rush of sensory information crashing into me. The charred battlefield. The massive, smoking corpse of the Thunderbird maybe fifty meters away, its dark plumage still smoldering with traces of pink flame. The crater-scarred landscape of the island stretching out in every direction.
"Where did you come from?" I asked the girl, my voice rough from screaming inside a kaiju's throat.
She ignored my question completely.
Instead, she reached out with one small, pale hand and placed it flat against my chest, directly over my heart. Her palm was cool against my skin, and I realized with a start that my shirt was in tatters, hanging off me in burned and shredded strips that barely qualified as clothing anymore.
But that wasn't what made me freeze.
My burns were gone. The lightning strikes that had scorched lines across my forearm and neck, the impact bruises from being thrown around inside the Thunderbird's mouth, the torn membrane of my left wing... all of it. Gone. I wasn't currently manifesting my wings, but I could feel them in that phantom limb way that devils always could, and they were whole. Completely healed. Like the damage had never happened.
"You are so warm," the girl said, her hand still pressed over my heart.
The words hit me in a way I wasn't prepared for. I blushed again, deeper this time, and a shiver ran down my spine that had nothing to do with the cold or the rain-soaked state of my ruined clothes.
I couldn't sense this girl's power at all.
That should have been impossible. I'd fought alongside my mother Serafall, one of the four Satans, and felt the crushing weight of her true power when she stopped holding back. I had developed a finely tuned sense for magical signatures, demonic energy, even the faint traces left by sacred gears and divine artifacts.
This girl registered as nothing. A complete blank. As if she existed outside the normal framework of power entirely.
The elf ears were an obvious tell that she wasn't human. Her mysterious appearance next to my unconscious body was another. And the fact that she was squatting calmly beside the burning corpse of a corrupted kaiju without showing the slightest sign of distress or even curiosity about it was perhaps the biggest red flag of all.
Whatever this girl was, she was so far beyond the Thunderbird that the creature's remains didn't even warrant her attention.
"I like feeling your warmth," she said, and then, without asking permission or giving any warning whatsoever, she stood from her squat, stepped directly into my personal space, and sat herself in my lap.
Her slim body pressed against mine, her arms looping around my torso, her head coming to rest on my shoulder. She was light, almost weightless, but the contact was undeniably there, warm despite her cool hands, solid despite her ethereal appearance. She nestled against me, and then she inhaled deeply, her nose brushing against my neck as she breathed in my scent.
I sat very, very still.
This was... not the weirdest situation I had ever been in. That honor probably still went to the time my mother ambushed me in a broom closet at Hogwarts while Hermione was topless, or possibly the magical girl TV show filming where I'd had to passionately kiss Serafall in front of a full production crew.
But this was definitely in the top ten.
What else was I supposed to do?
Slowly, carefully, I brought my arms up and gently hugged the strange girl back. She made a soft sound, almost like a sigh of contentment, and pressed herself closer.
"Um," I said eloquently. "Thanks for healing me. I think?"
"Yes," she confirmed against my shoulder. "I healed you."
Well, that answered that question. Mystery elf girl was responsible for my miraculous recovery. Which raised about seventeen new questions, starting with how and ending with why, but I had a feeling I wasn't going to get answers to any of them.
"I... I have to get up now," I said, as gently as I could manage. "I need to go check on my friends. My family. They ran to hide when the fight started, and I need to make sure they're okay."
The girl pulled back just far enough to look at my face. "Oh," she said, and the single syllable carried a weight of disappointment that seemed far too heavy for such a small word.
She didn't move from my lap immediately. Her fingers traced absently along the back of my neck, and I suppressed another shiver at the contact.
Her expression was still mostly blank, that perfect doll-like neutrality that seemed to be her default state. But there was something else there now. She was disappointed. And she didn't quite know what to do with the feeling. Something about that expression made my chest tighten in a way I couldn't explain.
"Can I feel your warmth again?" she asked.
I blushed at her phrasing. The words were innocent enough on the surface, but combined with the memory of her bare pussy and the feeling of her body pressed against mine, my mind went places it probably shouldn't have.
"Sure," I heard myself say. "If we ever meet again, you can... feel my warmth. Anytime."
Smooth, Harry. Real smooth. You just gave a mysterious, possibly divine entity permission to cuddle you whenever she wants.
The girl's expression shifted. That almost-pout faded, replaced by something that might have been satisfaction. Or anticipation. It was hard to tell with features that barely moved.
"We will," she said.
I blinked.
She was gone.
My eyes took a full second to register that she had vanished. My brain took another two seconds after that to accept it.
"Holy crap," I breathed. "Who the hell was that?"
No answer came. The island was silent except for the crackling of distant fires and the faint groaning of the Thunderbird's cooling corpse.
I ran through the possibilities in my head. The elf ears suggested fae, maybe? A local goddess?
But that didn't feel right either. Gods had presence. Gods had weight. You felt them coming from miles away, an approaching pressure like a storm front rolling in. This girl had felt like absolutely nothing at all, right up until she was touching me, and even then...
I shook my head. Mystery for another time. Right now, I had people to find.
My wings manifested at my mental command, spreading wide behind me in a rush of dark membrane and demonic energy. I flexed them experimentally, testing the range of motion, probing for any lingering damage. They were perfect. Better than perfect, actually. Whatever that girl had done, she'd healed me so completely that my wings felt stronger than they had before the fight started.
"Okay then," I muttered to myself. "Thank you, mysterious possibly-divine elf lady. I owe you one."
I crouched, spread my wings, and launched myself into the grey sky. The island blurred beneath me as I flew, scanning the rocky terrain for any sign of Jasmine, Marlene, Asia, or Newt.
XXX