Chapter 191: Three Seconds

He stopped trying to be careful with what the bell had left him. Instead of measuring it out he went straight down into the source of it and took hold with both hands, and the pain that came back up through him from doing that was worse than the arm. This time he did not aim at anybody. He put all of it into the floor between them.

"Lavafall!"

The boards did not burn so much as erupt. The gold-red went outward in a ring from where he stood rather than upward, and the shockwave that rode ahead of it hit the three of them like a ram swung at a gate.

They went off their feet together and into the far wall hard enough that the sound of it was mostly bone. Blood came out from under all three hoods at once. Now. Sirius put everything he had into the wand tip, drew his arm back until it was strung like a bow, and drove it forward.

"Diffindo!"

The red came off it solid enough to blind, went the length of the room faster than the eye could properly follow, and took the bell-holder across the back of the hand.

He was fast. Even half stunned against the stone he turned and rolled the wrist to put the bell behind his body, and it was still a fraction too slow.

The flesh opened and folded back. Blood came out of it in a jet, and the four fingers holding the bronze sprang apart on their own, because the nerve had been cut and nothing he wanted mattered any more. The bell left his hand, turned over once at the top of its arc, and started down toward the dust.

One of them found his voice while he was still getting his knees under him. "Get it!"

The other two were up and lunging for the place where it would land, both of them shouting.

Edward moved first, because he had been watching the hand and not the bell. He took the tearing in his left arm and flicked his wand out to the side.

"Flame Whip!"

The lash came out of nothing with gold guttering along its length, cracked once, and closed round the left man's ankle. Edward hauled back on it and put him flat on the boards in a cloud of dust. That was the gap.

"Accio!"

The falling bell checked in the air as though something had caught it on a line and came across the room toward Sirius fast.

The man with the ruined hand was not finished. He put his left inside his robes, came out with a black dagger with runes twisted along the blade, and threw it at the bell with everything he had left in him. It went through the room keening, and there was a dark green sheen along the edge that meant it had been quenched in something that would kill a man twice over.

"Down!"

The blade went past Sirius's shoulder, opened a line across it, and buried itself in the pillar behind. The wood around it began to hiss and smoke and stink of something gone sour. Sirius did not appear to notice he had been cut.

"Accio!"

The bronze crossed the last of the distance and landed in his bloodied palm with a slap.

It was cold. He did not stop to look at it or turn it over. He closed his fingers and put his magic into the thing the way a river goes through a broken levee, straight into the fine old workings inside it, all at once and with nothing held back. There was a small dry sound from inside the bell, and then several more, like ice giving way somewhere underfoot.

The dark gold runes across the bronze faded out as though somebody were running a flame along a page, and whatever had been living in the metal simply stopped. What was in his hand afterwards was a piece of scrap.

Edward felt it go. The hand that had been closed around his magic opened, and what had been held back came up through him like a tide coming over a wall. The patterns under his skin lit brighter than they had been all night, and the shield in front of him thickened and climbed until the gold was licking at the rotten beams overhead.

Sirius threw the dead bronze away over his shoulder and got his arm up, and his grey eyes had something in them that had been missing for a long time.

"The bell is finished! Now it is ours!"

Edward straightened up slowly, and the corner of his mouth went hard and cold.

His arm still sent its pain up through him in waves, but with what was moving in him now, the pain had been pushed into a corner where he could leave it. He raised his wand without a word. The tip put out a heat that pulled at the eye, and the room began to crackle faintly around him.

"Firestorm."

It was no longer a wave of anything. What came up out of the floor was a turning column that took the whole ruin of the shack into itself, splinters and dust and loose brick spinning up into the throat of it.

The three of them could not get clear of the pull. They threw up shields, one after another, clear ones and coloured ones, and every one of them touched the outer edge of the storm and went out silently, the way a bubble goes.

"Avada Kedavra!"

The one who had carried the bell had come apart completely. His eyes were red through and he sent the green at Edward with no thought behind it whatsoever, and it did not reach the inside of the storm before the turning fire tore it into pieces and swallowed them. Edward stood in the still centre with his robes snapping around him, and his face had nothing in it.

He brought the wand level, and what gathered at the tip was not the fire he had been throwing all night. It was slower and darker, and something came with it that made the room feel thin.

"Soul Ash."

He did not raise his voice, and every person in the building heard it clearly.

The gold-red drew in on itself until it was a single line with black turning along its edges, went out through the wall of the storm, and struck the man in the chest.

He stopped moving. Whatever had been in his eyes drained out of them and left nothing behind, because the curse had already cut the thread between what he was and what he was made of. Then the fire went in after it along the way the curse had opened.

The body twisted and blackened where it stood, and that was not the end of it. Something came up out of the ruin of him, translucent and struggling and shaped wrongly, hauled into the open by the flame that had gone in after it.

The sound that came out of it was not a sound a throat makes. It went on while the gold-red closed over the thing and held it, and it took perhaps three breaths, and then there was nothing left of him to burn and only a charred shape on the boards where a man had been standing.

The two who were left had stopped fighting. They had watched a companion destroyed body and soul together, with not even the ordinary dignity of dying left to him, and whatever they had been sent here to do went out of them entirely. The one on the left made a noise nothing human makes and slashed his wand at the floor.

"Fumos!"

Black smoke came out thick as poured ink and filled the shack corner to corner, until even the light of the firestorm went down to a dull orange smear.

"Ventus!"

Sirius spun his wand and drove a hard gust through it, but the other one had already taken the moment for what it was worth and gone at the broken window like something bolting from a snare, and put himself through it without slowing.

"You will not."

Edward barely looked. He put the wand toward the shape moving in the smoke.

"Fire Lance."

What went out was thin, white through its center with gold running around it, and it passed through the standing smoke without turning and took the man through the calf. The scream came back in through the window, and the smell arrived a second later on the night wind.

There was a hole through the leg the size of a bowl, with the flesh gone glassy at its rim, and around it the skin had taken a mark like a spiderweb that gave off a faint gold-red light of its own. That was what Edward's fire left behind in a living thing, and no ordinary healing was going to lift it off him.

But the man wanted to live more than he wanted the leg. Under the screaming came the flat crack of Apparition, and then the night had him and there was nothing out there but wind.

Sirius was already moving before the sound had finished. "He is gone."

Sirius reached the window in three strides and found the tree line swaying, a pool of blood going dark on the ground below, and nothing else. He brought his fist down on the frame hard enough to shake it. Both of them turned back to the last one in the room.