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Eighteen Senior Aurors?
Three Magic Helicarriers?
This was practically a declaration of war.
Garrett's heart sank. A chill crept up his spine, slow and cold.
It was over.
The rest of them finally pieced it together. The black-robed wizard had been sent by the Ministry of Magic too, specifically to deal with Skye and her abilities.
Coulson and the others exchanged glances, shock plain on every face.
Shocked that something this massive had happened right under their noses. And shocked that Hermione had taken down eighteen wizards by herself.
They had just seen what a single wizard could do.
Skye, powers newly awakened, had been nearly helpless against him. One wizard had completely overwhelmed her. So what did it even mean to defeat eighteen at once — eighteen wizards plus three Magic Helicarriers — while walking into an ambush?
The witch's power was on a different level entirely.
Luna seemed to notice where Coulson's thoughts were going. She pointed her wand at the wizard still crumpled on the floor.
"Him? He's nowhere near a real Auror. A temp, at best. That's the only reason I managed to deal with him so easily."
Nowhere near...
Coulson, May, and Skye all turned to look at the "temp" on the ground.
This was the man who had nearly wiped out their entire team. And he was the bottom of the barrel.
That kind of power, and he didn't even count?
If he was a temp, how strong were the Ministry's actual Aurors?
And Hermione, who had taken down eighteen of them simultaneously, was already somewhere beyond what they could picture.
Hand stepped forward carefully.
"You're a wizard?"
Luna nodded.
"My name is Luna." She said it simply, like an introduction at a dinner party. "Senior Hermione sent me. She said she was going to handle the big problem, but there might be some smaller trouble here that needed cleaning up. She figured the Ministry might go after her friends with special abilities."
That cleared it up instantly.
No wonder this young girl carried that kind of power. She was a wizard, and a Hogwarts student on top of it.
Since the Convergence, when three Hogwarts professors had appeared out of nowhere, and now with Tom Riddle turning out to be another Hogwarts graduate, the pattern was hard to miss. Hogwarts had become shorthand for terrifying. Any wizard who walked out of those doors was assumed to be exceptional, a different breed from the rest.
And judging by the way Luna had called her "Senior Hermione," the relationship there was clearly something more than casual.
That was when Coulson went still.
His gaze sharpened.
"Miss Lovegood came here because Hermione told her to." He said it quietly, more to himself than anyone. "She anticipated this."
Then his eyes moved, slowly, deliberately, to Garrett and Hand.
"So why did you two show up?"
The realization hit the room all at once.
These two hadn't come to help. They had come to finish the job. Luna's arrival had ruined their plan, so they had fallen back on looking like backup.
"The Clairvoyant."
Coulson said it under his breath, like the word had just clicked into place.
One of these two was the Clairvoyant they had been hunting for months.
The air went solid.
The crack of weapons being raised happened almost in the same instant, the soldiers on both sides pointing guns at each other, the room going from tense to explosive in a single breath.
Coulson's gaze swept between Garrett and Hand.
Garrett looked composed. Indignant, even, the expression of a man being wrongly accused.
Hand was stone-faced, eyes cold, her voice level as she laid out the case against Garrett.
Both of them had explanations. Both of them sounded reasonable. Both of them pointed at the other.
Trust had collapsed, and they were stuck.
Then Luna tilted her head.
"All this going back and forth," she said softly, "is so exhausting."
Every person in the room stopped moving.
She seemed completely unbothered by the tension. Her wand came up, pointing loosely between the two of them.
"Who the bad guy is — can't I just do Legilimency and find out?"
Coulson blinked.
Then it hit him.
Of course. Hermione used that spell. Direct access to someone's thoughts. No interrogation, no guesswork.
Was there anything more effective than that?
He knew firsthand how invasive it was, he and Fury had both been on the receiving end of it, and neither of them had enjoyed it. But right now, with friend and enemy standing in the same room, it was the cleanest solution available.
What Coulson and the others saw as a miracle was, for certain people in that room, something closer to a death sentence.
Garrett's stomach dropped.
The calm he had been performing, the wronged-man indignation, locked up on his face all at once.
A bead of sweat traced a quiet line down his temple.
Legilimency.
Seeing through thoughts.
Everything he had buried, everything he had spent years hiding, gone, in an instant.
He took half a step back without thinking. His eyes darted. The steadiness he had been projecting crumbled, and there was no putting it back together.
Across from him, Hand's expression shifted too. She frowned, her face caught somewhere between reluctance and resignation.
Letting someone read her mind like she was a suspect, a S.H.I.E.L.D. Level 8 agent sitting still for that. The secrets alone were enough to make her stomach turn.
But then she thought about Pierce. That traitor had already handed over everything. Every classified file, every operative, every protocol, sold out to the last page.
Worrying about secrets now was a bit late.
And the girl holding the wand had just turned that black-robed wizard into a pile on the floor in seconds.
Resistance wasn't really on the table.
Hand drew a long breath, let it out slowly, and said nothing. Silence was its own kind of answer.
The control room grew stranger by the second.
"Open fire!"
Garrett's voice cracked through the air like a whip.
"Kill them! All of them! Now!"
His soldiers moved before the echo died, guns up, muzzles dark, aimed at Coulson's group and at Luna.
The shots came in a wave.
Luna didn't flinch.
"Protego."
A transparent barrier snapped into place in front of her. Bullets slammed into it and stopped dead, like they had hit something solid that simply wasn't there.
And while the barrier held, her wand was already moving.
"Petrificus Totalus!"
Two seconds. Maybe three.
The gunfire cut off completely. Every soldier in the room locked rigid where they stood.
Silence fell back over the control room like a curtain dropping.
Coulson stared. May stared. Skye stared.
One breath ago, the room had been on the edge of a massacre. Now it was done.
Everyone turned to look at Garrett.
There wasn't much left to say.
The Clairvoyant, the phantom they had chased for months, the agent buried deep inside S.H.I.E.L.D. who had cost them more than they could count, had been John Garrett all along.
➤ Next: Prophecy
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