Chapter - 73 : Misunderstanding Part - 3

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She was all soft curves and eager sensuality Harry responded in kind as a warm glow built in his chest like a curtain being withdrawn revealing the sun from where it had been hiding.

The sound of Moody's gravelly voice caused them to jump apart like he had doused them in ice water. Their eyes darted every which way and Harry instinctively went for his wand, but the man was nowhere to be seen. Instead, floating ten feet away was a ghostly hedgehog Patronus, defensively curled into a ball so that its pointy spines were sticking out in every direction and Harry couldn't see which way it was facing.

"Word around the office is White has been in a scuffle with some Death Eaters in the Three Broomsticks. I don't care what you're doing Tonks; suit up and find out what happened."

Sound fell out of the world as Harry's brain ground to a halt. Of course the Order couldn't leave him alone if it involved Death Eaters, but there was only one reason a Patronus meant for Tonks would show up next to him. Someone was spying on him.

Wand already out, he was barking spells in an instant. "Accio invisibility cloak! Homenum Revelio!"

No cloaks came flying at him and the wash of magic that followed identified Amanda as the only human being in the vicinity.

Harry frowned. Where was Tonks? Had she realised she was caught and Disapparated? Used an emergency portkey? Clearly she'd gotten away if there wasn't anyone here but the two... of... them...

Ice cold fingers clawed their way up his spine as a horrifying thought took hold of his heart and squeezed.

Slowly, ever so slowly he turned around, hoping beyond hope that his fears were misplaced, but Amanda looked at him, biting her lower lip, sporting a pained and guilty expression on her face.

She winced and then her face wasn't her face any longer as it shifted and changed, her chin jutting a little more and her cheekbones rising into a heart-shaped face even as her hair shortened from long auburn curls to a shorter tomboy mousy brown.

"Tonks?" he whispered so softly it was barely audible.

Wide-eyed, she worried lower lip anxiously and his eyes zeroed in on that gesture, as if it was the only important sight in the world.

An image crossed his mind, of her biting her lip as she shot coy looks at him in the Three Broomsticks, as she shot the same looks at Remus at the Burrow. Another followed, of Remus and Tonks at Hogwarts – she worrying her lower lip – just before they would be pale still corpses laying in the battle-scarred Great Hall. He saw her with a rosy glow on her cheeks, long sweaty locks of auburn arrayed like a halo on his sheets as she moaned below him. And he saw a face just like hers but tiny, as Teddy played with his little metamorphmagus face and played with his lips like they were caterpillars independently travelling his chin.

Death and Lovers the Tarot cards had spelled out and he had promptly slept with a woman whose corpse he'd helped put into the ground. A narcissistic necropheliac, Cassandra had jokingly called him and he'd promptly made love to the mother of his godson; a godson who in all likelihood would now never be born.

With that last thought the world rushed back into focus and Harry broke his stare as he dropped to his knees and threw up until everything he'd eaten that day formed a puddle of bile by the side of the road. He found he could not look away from it even if the acrid stench repulsed him, for he had never felt so unclean as he did then.

"I've gotten a lot of reactions to guys sleeping with a metamorphmagus, you know, but I've got to say that this one one hurts a little," Tonks said hesitantly from a few feet away, trying and failing to be funny.

Harry's skin broke out in goosebumps. She had no right to try and brush off a betrayal such as this, to pretend she hadn't spent weeks lying to his face and spying on him for the Order. It stoked a fire of potential explosive proportions, but as if there was no oxygen to feed it his anger stayed dead as his mind struggled with thoughts of the one precious life that was his to protect; the life that was no more and now would never be.

"Why aren't you with Remus?" he asked in a dead tone, not looking away from the chunks of half-digested food and bile a foot away from his face.

"I'm sorry?" she said confused.

"You're supposed to be with Remus," he spoke, brow furrowed in confusion as if everything in the world had stopped making sense. "You shouldn't... with me. You and him... and then Teddy. It's not... You're supposed to be with Remus."

"I chased him for a long time, until he made it clear he was not that much different from everybody else like I had hoped." She sounded wary and weary. "I thought Teddy was your godson?"

The realisation that she of all people didn't know who Teddy was, the reminder that she was not the friend that he remembered acted like a bellows blowing air into the furnace of his stifled anger and Harry's vision went red as he exploded into motion, springing to his feet and raising his wand to curse the bitch.

Tonks was an Auror, though, a member of the elite dark wizard catching force and his wand was in her hand before he'd cast a single spell. Instead of following that up with a litany of curses, however, she hesitated and lowered her wand, her hair wilting on her head as she looked at him, heartbroken.

"You goddamn traitorous bitch!"

She shrunk back as if he'd struck her. "I'm sorry," she said miserably.

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