Title: Sister Healer

Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.

Pairings: Harry/Draco pre-slash, mentions of OC pairings and Ron/Hermione

Rating: R

Warnings: Violence, gore, OC character death, angst, torture.

Summary: Harry and Draco find themselves hunting a series of twisted with a grudge against a Healer—or perhaps a series of twisted being used as proxies by someone else, from a distance. How much evidence is there for a new Dark Lord? Fourth in the Cloak and Dagger series, sequel to "Rites of the Dead."

Author's Notes: Welcome to the next fic in the Cloak and Dagger series, with Harry and Draco as Auror partners hunting dangerous Dark wizards. The series consists of mingled one-shots and longer fics—so far "Invisible Sparks", one-shot, "Hero's Funeral," multi-part, and "Rites of the Dead," one-shot. The one-shots are not strictly necessary to read, but do add to the internal chronology. This story will consist of about nine or ten parts, and be updated every Wednesday evening.

Sister Healer

"You're ready."

Malfoy's voice was an inch from his ear, and that still might have been too loud. Harry nodded fractionally, his eyes locked on the doorway in front of them. The twisted they were hunting had proved to have a flaw of extraordinarily keen hearing. He might be able to hear the sweat sliding down Harry's wand where he held it. And he had a hostage, a Healer with his knife to her throat, who he would probably be able to kill before Harry and Malfoy did anything about it, unless they were extraordinarily careful.

The only good thing about having him cornered here, in an abandoned building outside Hogsmeade, was that no one else was likely to get hurt.

Except the hostage, Harry thought, and wondered whether the twisted could hear the hair rubbing against his collar.

"Now," Malfoy said, or Harry thought he said—he might just have felt Malfoy's breath against his ear in that shape—and then rose and cast the nonverbal spell they had agreed on. The air split with the shrieks of a thousand demented cats. They were hoping the intense noise would disorient the twisted; it was worth a try, since he had killed two times so far because his victims' heartbeats were too loud in his ears.

From inside the building came a scream. Harry blasted the door aside and charged in, Malfoy right at his back.

The building had been a shop, and a few aisles and counters were still standing. Harry took in the scenery with a sweeping glance; he and Malfoy had already used their Patronuses to spy it out through the window.

Yes, there was a pile of splintered wood in front of him that he would have to leap, and a counter not far from the door with chairs in front of it. Harry tapped the small of Malfoy's back in the prearranged signal that everything was as they had thought it was, and then sprinted left, while Malfoy went right.

They were just in time. The twisted always had companions, people or beasts they had conjured or enslaved, and the first of them was pounding after Harry, an enormous black dog running in perfect silence, except where the iron teeth smashed together. Harry leaped for cover behind the pile of wood, and the dog's teeth caught in a board, making the pile collapse. Harry slid on more wood as the twisted screamed again.

The dog rose above him, coming down in a pinpoint perfect motion that a living hound could never have managed.

"Fulmen!" Harry spat, and a miniature storm formed right where the dog's belly was. Lightning clawed it apart, thunder rang in its ears, and rain rose from inside it, drowning it. The dog screamed soundlessly and writhed, and fell to the floor, dying.

Another one leaped at him, but Harry whirled to the side, and there was a rope of dark energy where he had been, concealed by his body. It lashed up and around the dog's legs, and it fell with a scream. Harry laughed, and had the feeling that the laugh had sounded a bit mad. That didn't matter. What did was moving, constantly, shifting from position to position, ignoring the dogs who panted behind him as if they were unimportant. And he let out flashes and bangs and booms as he moved, to keep the attention of the twisted with the knife at the Healer's throat firmly on him.

All the better to distract from Malfoy.

Malfoy had claimed that he could move more silently than a shadow. Harry hadn't believed him, but these hounds were all shadow, and Harry could still hear their teeth chopping. He could only see Malfoy, and then only because he knew where to look. He jerked his eyes away in the next second, and hoped that the twisted hadn't been following the motions of his head.

It seemed not. Malfoy arrived at the position they needed, right behind the elbow of the arm that the twisted was using to hold the knife, without him noticing. Then he jabbed forwards with all his might.

In his hand was a slender needle of the kind that mediwizards at St. Mungo's used to take blood. Although the Healers there refused to treat him anymore, and had mostly used magic when they did, Harry recognized it. Some of the more modern Healers preferred it because not many of their trainees could concentrate on the spell that would open skin only to the blood, not the bone.

The needle sank into the twisted, and the blood began to flow. The twisted, a big man with matted brown hair and blue eyes that had never been clear, gaped around, not seeming to notice where the danger came from.

Or what the danger was. The moment Malfoy had a few drops of the blood, he swept his wand down and broke the needle off. The splinters of shattering glass danced over the twisted's shoulder, and he turned, automatically, to follow the sound. The knife scraped against the Healer's throat, and she made a frightened noise.

Harry took that as his cue, casting the spell he had prepared that severed the knife-holding hand at the wrist. Then he used an invisible rope of air to snare the Healer around the waist and pull her to safety.

The twisted screamed, and Harry thought it likely he would die from loss of blood. But they couldn't take that chance. Five things made up the definition of a twisted: they couldn't use Healing spells; they always had companions; they always had a flaw, a Dark gift of wandless magic; the target had a personal symbol; and they used Dark spells, always, even when others would make more sense. Harry kept moving with the Healer, rolling behind a counter, keeping them out of range of the powerful magic that would pursue them any second.

Malfoy spoke the spell of blood magic he was working aloud, a choice Harry approved of. It let the twisted know where he was, yes, but trying to make sure that a nonverbal incantation worked would take more power, and thus more time. And there was something Harry liked in the irony that a wizard sensitive to sound would be destroyed by it.

"Cruor trans gladio!"

The air seemed to spark and ring, and Harry poked his head up above the counter just in time to see the spell come to life. An enormous sword fountained out of the blood in the needle that Malfoy held; it glowed red and had foam running along the sides, as though it had risen from an ocean where a hundred people had died. It swept down, and a moment later, the twisted's head was rolling on the floor.

The shadow hounds—the few that Harry hadn't destroyed—flickered and turned into mere shadows. Harry nodded to Malfoy, and he nodded back.

"Merlin, you killed him. You used blood magic."

Harry blinked down at the woman in his arms. He had nearly forgotten about her; she was important, of course, as the hostage that he and Malfoy were in part risking their lives to save, but she was also unimportant. The important thing was killing the twisted, which Socrates Corps had been formed to do. It was impossible to reason with them, and very strict rules applied to their capture, one of which stated that no bystander would be in immediate danger if the Socrates Aurors tried. The Healer herself had meant that death was necessary.

But she stared at him with such horrified eyes that Harry winced. He had forgotten those people outside the Corps wouldn't know what they did, or at least wouldn't look on it as favorably as the Ministry did. And he had never had the best of track records with Healers. He coughed awkwardly and moved back, standing so that she could decide whether she wanted to touch him or not. She ended up taking his arm so she could rise, but let it go in the next instant and huddled back against the counter, shivering.

"Are you all right, madam?" Harry asked, though he didn't know whether she merited the title. She was young enough that she still could have been a mediwitch in training, about Ginny's age, with blonde hair that curled over her shoulders and innocent grey eyes. She looked again at the dead man on the floor, and then back at him.

"Harry Potter?" she asked, as if she had never thought that part of Harry's job might be the killing of those he hunted.

"Yeah." Harry swallowed down a throat that felt bruised, and moved away from her so Malfoy could approach. No, he didn't have a good track record with Healers at all. She might even be one of those who had voted to let St. Mungo's ban him and refuse to treat him anymore. It was better to let Malfoy handle her. "Miranda Alto?"

Perhaps it was because the thrill of battle still rode Draco, but at first glance, the woman he and Potter had risked their lives to save didn't look like much.

Or perhaps it was because, until she moved into the clear light and he could see that her eyes were grey, not green, she reminded him of Daphne.

Draco gritted his teeth at the thought and stepped forwards, bowing slightly as Alto said, "Yes. Why did you do that?" Her gaze found and locked on Draco, and she gave a little blink. Draco wondered if she recognized him or not. If so, he could deal with the usual disdain against Death Eaters, and Potter would owe him later for sparing him the special disdain that Healers had against Harry Potter.

"Kill the man?" Draco asked.

Alto nodded, so focused on him that Draco would have wondered if they had met before, or if she had forgotten about Potter, except that he thought it was probably part of the quality that made her a Healer. She would be tiresome about moral realities as well as wounds, almost certainly.

"He had gone mad from the study of Dark Arts," Draco said. It was the simplest definition of a twisted, minus the five parts that the Ministry had really only deduced by going back and studying the history of Dark Lords. "He couldn't be reasoned with, couldn't be stopped, and our prisons might not have been strong enough to hold him. We've had experience with his kind before."

"He was still a living human being."

Draco curled his lips. Yes. Alto was indeed tiresome. She stood before him with her hands on her hips, her face tilted up and full of outrage, as though the man hadn't threatened her a second before. Draco shook his head. He saw no reason that he shouldn't agree with her and take her back to hospital, where her fellow Healers were waiting for her. Agreement was less effort than argument.

He had argued enough with those in his life who would never accept his words, no matter what he said.

"Malfoy?"

Potter, catching his eye and asking silently if the division of labor they had agreed on before the attack still held. Draco nodded, mildly irritated. Kellen Moonborn, his former partner, had never had this obsessive need to check that Draco still wanted the same things he had already said he wanted.

On the other hand, the first case Draco and Kellen had worked together hadn't turned out nearly disastrous, either, unlike the Larkin case. Perhaps he should feel grateful that Potter wanted to check with him, instead of charging off into the wild the way he had before.

"Come along, Miss Alto," Draco said, holding out his arm so that she could take it. She looked like the kind of woman who might appreciate those courtesies, like his mother, who she rather resembled.

"It's Healer Alto," she said stiffly, but she took his arm, only giving one quick glance over her shoulder at Potter. Draco looked with her and saw that Potter had knelt and drawn a vial from his pocket, to gather some of the blood spilled in the attack. There were Potions masters and magical theorists in the Ministry who were always interested in such things, sure that they would learn someday to identify twisted through their physical composition. Draco thought the Mind-Healers had a better chance.

"Have you worked together long?" Alto asked, as they stepped into the sunlight.

Draco muffled his snort. Of course she wanted to know about Potter; everyone Draco came into contact with did. Even Astoria, Daphne's sister and thus off-limits since the end of Draco and Daphne's betrothal, had written to him asking if it was true that the Savior practiced Dark magic on the sly. Draco had taken some satisfaction in burning that one. The answer was that yes, of course he did, and Draco would have respected him less if he tried to rely exclusively on defensive magic when they were dealing with the twisted.

"Well?"

Alto didn't seem inclined to let it go. Draco sighed and glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. She looked like a pure-blood, he thought, classic bone structure and delicate lines of nose and mouth and chin, but he didn't recognize her name, which probably made her a half-blood at best. "Two months," he answered.

"You looked better-coordinated than that."

That surprised a dry laugh out of Draco. "What do you intend to accuse us of?" he asked, as he stepped beyond the wards that had damped Apparition out of the area. "That we must have practiced harder than it seems?"

"I didn't mean to accuse you of anything." Alto frowned at him and pushed her thick curls out of her eyes. "Both of you are extraordinarily jumpy and snappish for men who make a living saving people."

Draco shrugged and glanced around once to make sure there were no Muggles nearby to observe them. He and Kellen had prevented their first case from becoming a disaster, yes, but it had tended that way when Draco nearly Apparated in front of a Muggle he hadn't seen. "Your brother and sister Healers banned my partner from hospital," he said. "The interest you show in him seems hardly neutral."

Alto's eyes clouded with distress. "I wanted no part of that," she said softly. "I argued that we had a responsibility to treat all wizards injured or sick, even if they were dangerous. There are other precautions we could take to make sure that they did not hurt us or other patients. But my brothers and sisters, as you said, disagreed."

Draco shrugged again, neither agreeing nor disagreeing, and Apparated, the outer entrance of St. Mungo's firmly in mind. When they appeared in the middle of the alley, Alto released a small breath that sounded like a shriek. "You didn't warn me that you intended to Side-Along me," she said.

"I didn't think I had to," Draco said, and began to walk with such long strides that Alto had to shut up and hurry up. "I thought it obvious it would happen."

Alto glanced up at him with clouded eyes again. "And you are extraordinarily rude, as well," she whispered.

Something tugged at Draco, something cold and low down in his chest. He winced. He had thought that perhaps he was influencing Potter, to be calmer and more polite, instead of resorting to the worst case scenario immediately. But Potter might be influencing him. He waited a few seconds for the impulses to pass, and then spoke quietly and calmly. "I'm sorry, Healer Alto. But you can see why I assumed that the animosity of St. Mungo's might extend to me as well, given that Harry is my partner."

"It need never," Alto said, and held out a hand to him with a gesture like a tendril bowing in the breeze. Draco took it, and found himself pressing his lips to the back of it. Well, and why not? She looked like his mother, she disdained the title of lady but only because she had one that seemed to matter to her more, and she was small and graceful and refined. None of those were adjectives that could apply to Potter, whom Draco had spent the most time with in the past few weeks. "If you are hurt, come to me. I promise, I will heal you. I don't care how much it takes. You saved my life."

Her gaze was bright. Draco found himself bowing again, suddenly glad that he had saved her. She reminded him of other things in life, that he could live and not just work, and that he didn't have to snap and jump like Potter did.

"Does that apply to Harry as well?" he asked. He never called Potter by his first name except in front of others, to test how they reacted to his intimacy with the Chosen One, but he thought he could do it now.

"Yes," Alto said, and gave him a small smile. "As long as we're away from St. Mungo's. I have to make sure that I don't lose the ability to help people in hospital, after all."

Draco nodded. Of course he understood. If you had an ally, it never did to undermine the ally's power, and hence the reason why you'd wanted them in the first place. "Thank you," he said softly.

"I should be the one to thank you, since I'm the one who owes you the debt." Alto gave him a sad smile and opened the door. "Though I think, given the lives you lead, that I'll have the chance to return it soon enough."

Draco watched her go, and took a long breath before he Apparated back to the Ministry to begin the paperwork for the case. He often handled it, since his handwriting didn't look like the scrawlings of a drunken spider.

He was still courteous. He still came from a heritage that valued it. It was nice to remember.

"Did the Potions masters learn anything?"

Harry shrugged with one shoulder, not looking around, and continued with the report he was writing. Some days he could tolerate being partnered to Malfoy better than others, and this was one of the worse days. If Malfoy was going to take hours Apparating the Healer back to hospital and then picking up the paperwork they needed, he could have bloody well said so.

But that was only the Malfoy arrogance that Harry reckoned he would never really outgrow, even if the people who had known Malfoy whispered around the Ministry about how much he had changed.

"From the blood," Malfoy said, and laid one hand on the desk, near the framed photograph of Lionel that Harry had brought in from his house. "Did they learn anything from the blood you gathered?"

"I don't know," Harry murmured, keeping his eyes on the words in front of him instead of Malfoy's neatly-trimmed nails. Who cut their nails to that round a curve, anyway? "I imagine it takes rather more than a day to learn about things like that."

Malfoy tapped his fingers. Up and down, tap tap tap, arch arch arch, and no matter how hard Harry tried, his hands would never look that way. It had driven Lionel mad sometimes. He had bullied Harry, once, into taking care of his hands with expensive lotions and scissors for about a week. Harry had done it because he loved him, but all that had happened was him tearing shreds of paper off his reports because he couldn't bite his nails, and Lionel had given up in disgust.

"I know that," Malfoy said. "I simply wondered if they had reported anything."

"They told me it would take a day at least to learn what I wanted to know, and I should go away and stop asking them," Harry said, finally tilting back in his chair so that he could look up at Malfoy.

Malfoy's pale cheeks flushed. Harry had seen everything from the faintest pink flush to a great, rich, scarlet cloak on him now, and he had to admit he enjoyed them all. He didn't fuck blokes, but he liked looking at them. The Ministry could have picked someone worse to partner him with. "You could have mentioned that," Malfoy said.

The fire was out of his tone, so Harry let the fight go with a shrug and turned back to his report. It was almost finished. "You need to sign this, and then I can take it to Okases and file it, and that'll be the end of the case."

Malfoy stared at him. "Since when are you so industrious? It usually takes you at least two hours to write a report."

Harry blinked. Does he think I didn't notice the amount of time he was away, or does he assume that everyone else is lazy when he is? The way the world revolves around him in his own head, it could be either. "I've had them," he said. "And I didn't have anyone else chattering away in the background to distract me."

"It's—" Malfoy cast a Tempus Charm, and then stared at the result that floated in front of him as if he had no idea how to read the small numbers.

"Four, right," Harry said, and rose with a stretch. He had hurt something in his back when he fell over that pile of wood to avoid the leaping dog, he thought. He would take it easy tonight. Dinner with Ron and Hermione meant comfortable chairs and Hermione insisting that no one else help her with the meal, anyway. She was determined to prove that she could cook as well as she could do everything else. "You want to sign this?" he added, putting his own name to the report with a flourish and holding it out.

"How could it be four-o'clock?" Malfoy whispered, not deigning to notice him. "I never spent that much time with Healer Alto."

Harry rolled his eyes. Malfoy sounded like George wondering where the time had gone when he was occupied with a project. "I'm sure her conversation was fascinating," he said. "I wouldn't know. I seem to have angered most of the Healers in the wizarding world, for some reason. Anyway." He tossed the report on the desk. "You can take it to Okazes, if you want to stay here. I'm out."

When Potter was gone, Draco sat down behind the desk and ran his fingers over his forehead, checking for signs of a bump or fever.

But when he thought about it, things had taken longer than he thought they would that afternoon, and for good reason. There was—there was the fact that he'd talked with Alto, and watched her go into hospital, and then gone back to the shop where they'd ambushed Jerome only to find Potter already gone, and then talked with a few other Aurors, and then come back in with the files that he had to retrieve.

Yes, it could have gone four before he had known it. He simply hadn't expected that, and so had been a bit unnerved when Potter accused him of lateness.

Draco shook his head. He was still a better, more rules-oriented, less reckless Auror than Potter. He leaned over, signed his name on the report, and then began his own report, to prove it to anyone who wanted to mutely inquire.