Nothing. Not that he was expecting anything, but it always paid to make sure. The last thing he wanted was a gunshot wound to deal with. He always kept his wand in hand over a long sleeve during these exchanges. If they ever did try anything funny, they'd be quite surprised when they found their bullets stopping in mid air between them.
He trudged on a bit further.
"Tempus."
1:57am
Okay, that should be long enough.
He silenced himself, and apparated some five hundred metres south, right behind a random tree around the clearing in the woods.
"Homenum revelio." The hairs on the back of his neck stood on edge. There were two people standing in the middle of the clearing, like usual, but there was also one person standing behind him, almost outside the range of his detection spell. Almost, but not quite.
What was he doing there? A scout maybe? A watcher? Someone Curtis assigned to make sure the men he sent were doing their jobs? He was too far away to interfere directly with him, and wouldn't be able to see him through all this underbrush, so that didn't make much sense either.
He hefted the heavy bag from his shoulder. Whatever. He'd deal with it.
Harry stepped out from behind the tree and walked towards the two men, making sure to keep his physical shield cast in front of him. "Malfoy," Goon A greeted him with a grunt. "You have the money?" Goon B nodded. "You have the goods?" He nodded, and flashed the inside of the rucksack.
Suddenly, magic flowed over him, very familiar magic. His eyes widened slightly. An anti apparition ward.
"Malfoy? You okay?" He looked the man straight in the eyes, watched memories flash across his consciousness, saw the trap, and moved. Goon A clutched his head, cried out, and stumbled back. Goon B shouted.
Harry wandlessly banished both of them backwards with a swing of his rucksack holding arm.
And then, seemingly from nowhere, a huge dog leapt from the underbrush straight at him.
Startled, Harry stepped backwards and went for a disillusionment.
The dog transformed into Lord Black complete with Auror shield.
Fuck.
Harry's disillusionment activated.
Lord Black started a stunner chain. Harry flicked the first stunner away, dodged the second, and swung his cloak around him on the third, watching with wide eyes as the stunner hit the cloak, travelled along the inside of the water-like cloth, and out the other side, barely missing his shoulder, but giving him just enough time to point his wand at the ground, cast the most powerful smell obliterating tergeo spell he could, and fly up into the air, tracing his path back to the tree and casting lessor, silent tergeo spells as he went.
Shouts and cries went up all over the clearing.
Just as he reached the tree, a second wave of magic flowed over him. A containment ward. His heart pounded. Trapped. Trapped! TRAPPED! He shook himself. NO! Not trapped. Sweating, fighting down the urge to panic. Harry flew at top speed to a random point in the forest, landed, unshrunk his trunk, climbed inside, flinging his cloak over the trunk as he descended, grabbed his miniature ward stones, climbed back out, set up the stones in a one metre square around him, sat crosslegged on the ground under the cloak and started to meditate.
For twenty minutes, the shouts of men and the casting of dozens of different types of detection spells rang out across the clearing and through the woods. Everything from homenum revelio, to water spells, and chalk, Animagus Revelio, and elemental wind, rain, and fog spells.
Harry sat, his heart beating like mad, as one auror, tall, bald, and black, walked past him, not twenty metres away before continuing on. Eventually, he took a long breath, pointed his wand at the wardstone standing right between his crossed legs in the middle of the square metre space, summoned all his magical powers, and hissed, "Fidelius Occultum."
The fidelius charm activated.
Harry let out a sigh of relief.
Safe.
It had taken the auror team three whole hours to finally give up — often with Alex's father sniffing around the fidelius charm, making puzzled, doggy whining noises. Needless to say, Daphne, Hermione, and Angelystor were out of their minds with worry when he Morse coded them his situation on his lightning bolt ring, but the desperate hug he'd gotten when he finally stumbled back into the shrieking shack had left him feeling strangely okay about the situation.
"You mean, the money to build the manor, came from drug smuggling?" Hermione sat crossed legged on her chair, nibbling her lip, and looking worried.
Harry nodded. "Safest way I had. It's not like I personally go around doing the stuff that drug dealers do. I just moved things from point A to point B."
"You were nearly caught, Harry."
Harry cringed. "Well, it hardly makes any difference, Curtis seems to be out of the game now. He was fifty percent of the business, and I never could find other buyers with the time I had." Daphne had sat herself on one of the desks and was idly swinging her legs back and forth. "So, what's our position then?"
"We've got fourteen thousand galleons (£700,000) in stock. Assuming nothing happens to my other buyers, that'll be liquidated in the next twelve months."
"And how long will that last us?"
Harry wrinkled his nose. "Depends on how much we spend — mostly on how much our house elves end up costing us. But assuming we can't get the philosopher's stone… we'd be in deep trouble by this time next year."
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