The mourners left in ones and twos. Tom waited while Nicolas finished a conversation with Dumbledore, then brought everyone back to the house.
He sent Astoria upstairs to bed, left Daphne to her sister's capable management, and went down to the basement. He set the glass vial on the workbench and uncapped it.
The beetle inside made immediately for the walls, tracing the perimeter of the room in search of a gap. There was none. The door sat flush against the stone, the stone sat flush against itself, and the whole room held without any crevice worth the name. Tom watched and waited.
After a moment, the beetle stopped moving. Then it began to change.
The transformation unfolded with the practiced ease of something done thousands of times. The insect stretched, expanded, and reorganised itself into a woman. She had a towering arrangement of blonde hair wound into elaborate curls, a pointed jaw, and a face that had been treated with what could conservatively be described as an extraordinary volume of cosmetics. A pair of enormous rhinestone-studded glasses in the shape of a toad's eyes sat across her nose bridge.
Extravagant. Gaudy. These two words arrived in any observer's mind before any others, and very rarely found competition.
This was Rita Skeeter, the most famous and depending on who you asked, most notorious journalist in wizarding Britain.
In a community that generally valued straightforwardness and tradition, Skeeter was a particular kind of anomaly. She shared something with Gilderoy Lockhart in her preference for sensation over accuracy, for the story that moved people over the story that happened. Her enchanted Quick-Quotes Quill had earned her the sincere ill-will of a substantial portion of the British wizarding population. She had built a career on distortion and survived it through a very precise understanding of which people she could afford to distort and which she could not.
"Mr. Riddle." She managed a smile with the effort visible behind it. "You look as impressive as ever."
They had dealt with each other before. The dramatic headlines that had followed Tom through his more public moments had largely been Skeeter's work. But Lady Greengrass had arranged a quiet conversation early on, and after that the coverage had been not only positive but tilted toward flattery in ways that a careful reader might notice. Skeeter had not even taken the money offered. The association with the Greengrass family was protection enough, another layer of insurance against the wrong person deciding she was a problem.
She had an instinct for that kind of arithmetic. Dumbledore was the most celebrated white wizard of the century, and she had written unflattering things about him regularly, because Dumbledore was too principled to retaliate through private channels and too image-conscious to make a spectacle of it. Same with Ministry officials, up to and including the Minister himself. Their concern for appearances made them reliable non-reactors. She could say almost anything about them.
But there was one category she had learned to leave alone: old pure-blood families, especially the ones from Slytherin. They had money, connections, and no reputation to protect. Touch one and you touched all of them, and unlike Ministry officials, they did not require political cover to make someone disappear. The Greengrass family presented a pleasant face to the world, but Skeeter had dug deep enough over the years to understand what sat underneath it.
And now, before that insurance had even been used, she had landed in front of Tom Riddle directly.
"Let me think," Tom said, settling behind the workbench. His fingers tapped the surface at irregular intervals, each one arriving in Skeeter's chest like a small impact. "There are seven registered Animagi in this century. Miss Skeeter's name doesn't appear on that list."
"A beetle," he continued. "Small, unremarkable, goes entirely unnoticed. That explains rather a lot about the quality of your sources."
The sweat forming along Skeeter's hairline had nothing to do with the temperature. The idea of reaching for her wand flashed through her mind and was gone before it fully formed. She had seen what Tom had done to a family that owned armed Aurors and a fortified estate. She was a journalist.
"Mr. Riddle. Please. Just this once."
She chose surrender.
"I'm not as unreasonable as all that." Tom shook his head with the mild amusement of someone being accused of something they don't quite recognise in themselves. "We've worked together before and it was always agreeable. Here's the arrangement: you work for me going forward. In exchange, this conversation never happened. What do you think?"
Unreasonable?
You are not human.
Skeeter ran through possible exits, possible excuses, possible ways to delay, and felt the air in the room drop several degrees before she had finished the first one. The cold was not metaphorical. It arrived on her skin and moved inward, and she found she could not quite complete the thought she had been having.
"Miss Skeeter." Tom stood and crossed the room to stand beside her. She discovered she could not move. Not a limb, not a finger. "Many people find you distasteful. I find you useful."