Chapter 401: Number 12, Grimmauld Place (Edited)

Tom: Huh?

Mr. Granger startled Tom with his sudden act, leaving him confused.

At that moment, Tom didn't understand why Mr. Granger was doing that, and he went along without fully grasping it.

On the side, Hermione understood her father's thought and felt embarrassed. What was her father thinking? Hermione couldn't help but tease that she and Yodel were the clean and pure ones, while her own father had impure thoughts on his mind.

After making a fool of himself, Hermione was taken upstairs by her mother, leaving Tom and Mr. Granger alone in the living room. Mr. Granger took Tom's arm and dragged him into his bedroom.

The room was spacious, with a double bed in the center, a dresser in one corner, and a huge wardrobe that melded into the wall. Along with numerous photographs of the Granger couple scattered everywhere, it wasn't hard to guess that this was the host's master bedroom.

Tom decided not to say anything and went straight to the bathroom attached to the room. He took a hot shower and felt refreshed. When he came out of the bathroom, he noticed that Mr. Granger was already asleep on the bed.

Tom was getting ready to lie down when he suddenly remembered that he hadn't placed his Christmas gifts under the tree. He got off the bed and approached the bedroom door. To his surprise, the door was locked, and he couldn't find the key anywhere.

Tom turned the doorknob twice, but the wooden door didn't budge an inch.

"Where are you going?" The sound of the door awakened Mr. Granger, who propped himself up on one elbow, with sleepy eyes, looking at Tom.

"I forgot to put my Christmas presents under the tree for tomorrow..."

"Tomorrow morning, I'll go with you. Now go to sleep quickly."

Tom's instinct told him that something was amiss, but alcohol had dulled his mind, and what Mr. Granger said made sense, so Tom didn't argue and obediently lay down on the bed, entering the world of dreams.

...

A few hours ago.

Sirius landed in an empty square, surrounded by a desolate wasteland. Harry looked around, trembling not out of fear but because of the cold enveloping him in the air.

Everything was dark, the street lamps barely emitted light and seemed ready to go out at any moment. The nearby houses had a gloomy appearance, with many broken windows. The peeling doors and trash-covered stairs all revealed the neighborhood's decay.

Sirius found a spot to park his motorcycle and secured it. Then, he led Harry across the meadow and a street until they stood in front of a residential building.

Standing outside the building, Harry could clearly hear the deafening music blasting from the speakers, as well as smell the stench of decaying garbage. Even the Dursleys would be repulsed passing through this place, considering that the dirt on the ground would soil the tires of their new car.

"Is this your home?" Harry looked at Sirius.

"Let's say it is," his godfather replied absentmindedly, while observing the building in front of them.

The building was peculiar: the house adjacent to number 11 was number 13, and number 12 had completely disappeared. This was strange because even to avoid the unlucky number, it would be logical to eliminate number 13, but why conceal number 12?

After a brief moment, the walls of the building turned rubbery, and a broken door emerged between numbers 11 and 13, followed by dirty walls and windows. In no time, a house "squeezed" and appeared.

While all this happened, the people living in house number 11 didn't seem to notice anything, as if nothing was happening.

"Es just a little trick; most wizarding families living in Muggle areas do this," explained Sirius Black to Harry about the concealment charm on his house. "Well, stop standing there, come inside with me."

He led Harry up the weathered stone steps to the front door of his house.

Sirius's house door was in poor condition and didn't live up to the prestige of his ancient pure-blood lineage. It was covered in scratches, and the black paint had peeled off. The only impressive thing was the silver ring on the door, shaped like a coiled snake and looking exquisite.

Sirius pulled out his wand and tapped the door, producing a resonant metallic sound and a jingling like chains moving behind the door.

The grand door in front of Harry creaked open, revealing a dimly lit foyer. Sirius entered first, followed by a whisper of sounds, and then a row of antique lanterns on the wall lit up. The lantern light filtered through the frosted glass, creating a sense of unreality and mist.

Harry noticed that most of the furniture in the house had snake-like shapes.

"Haha, luckily the lights still work!" Sirius exclaimed cheerfully. Due to his good mood and being back in his home, his voice sounded a bit louder than usual.

Before Harry and Sirius could do anything else, they heard...

"Beasts! Despicable! Offspring of dirt and sin! Bastards, monsters, deformed abominations, be gone from here! How dare you defile the ancestral residence of my family?" A horrible, deafening, spine-chilling scream echoed from behind two hole-ridden velvet curtains, and in the next second, the curtains opened automatically, revealing a portrait roughly the size of a real person.

The portrait depicted an old woman, spitting saliva and her eyes rolling in their sockets. Her yellowish skin was taut from the scream, and she waved her clawed hands as if trying to scratch Harry and Sirius's faces through the portrait.

However, when Sirius approached while covering his ears, the old woman closed her mouth. Her eyes widened, and her face turned pale. "Sirius Black, you... you've really... come back..." she said in a trembling voice.

She stopped screaming, and her eyes regained composure. Harry saw a flicker of sanity in her gaze, something that hadn't been present moments before.

"You've come back," she said in a much more normal tone.

Sirius looked at her in silence, as if examining her face, comparing her current appearance to his memory of her. Finally, he nodded wordlessly.

The old woman watched him in silence.

"I've come back... Mother." Sirius hesitated for a moment and finally uttered those words with effort.

The old woman nodded, and perhaps it was an illusion on Harry's part, but he seemed to catch a fleeting glimmer of relief in the old woman's expression.

"From today, you are the new head of the Black family," said the portrait of the old woman to Sirius.