Even the wizarding world had its own version of bad juju.
Mystical nonsense was universal.
The Aurors stared at each other for a long while.
"Captain... are these children all... not quite right? Is this some kind of Muggle asylum?" one of the Aurors muttered under his breath.
"..."
Kingsley did not answer.
His gaze swept across the adults who had followed the children out. Mrs. Hawke's face was deathly pale, her lips trembling uncontrollably. She looked terrified.
She looked like a dried branch that might snap at any moment.
Mrs. Millie was covering her face with both hands, her shoulders shaking. Old Tom's shovel had sunk into the dirt, and he was leaning against the handle like he might faint at any second.
These adults were reacting the way normal people should react.
But the children?
"At least this one seems halfway normal."
Kingsley's eyes settled on the "trembling" Iain.
He stood there with a paper crown on his head, shaking with fright, empty-handed, looking utterly out of place among the swarm of overexcited little maniacs around him.
To Kingsley, that was a normal reaction.
To Iain, however, the fact that Kingsley was looking at him at all was the single greatest danger sign imaginable. Already wound tight as a spring, Iain felt his nerves jump the moment he sensed that gaze.
He lacked life experience. Before crossing over, he had merely been a sheltered college student, never tested by any great storms of life, much less by being singled out by law enforcement.
So in this situation, the only risk-reduction strategy he could come up with was simple:
blend in as much as possible.
And so, under Kingsley's gaze, Iain made his choice.
"That awful bad man! Yes! We absolutely can't let this go! We have to resist! We have to fight back!"
Iain tried his best to act as "normal" as the other children.
"Resist! Fight back!" the children shouted with him.
"Fight the zombies!"
"Fight the zombies! Fight the zombies!"
Pitchforks went up. Pot lids began clanging.
Rolling pins swung through the air. Dozens of children became a makeshift little militia in the orphanage yard, shouting slogans at the top of their lungs.
Each wave of noise rose louder than the last.
Mrs. Hawke pushed herself away from the doorframe and tried to walk toward them, but her legs gave way and she nearly collapsed again. Clinging to the wall, she called out in a hoarse voice,
"Children... go back... go back inside..."
No one listened.
"Dear God! The Devil has bewitched the children!" Mrs. Millie had begun to cry outright.
"I knew it, I knew it, the prophecy about the end of the world is real. There are still a few years left, but this must already be the beginning."
Old Tom's shovel slipped from his hands and hit the ground with a dull thud.
Kingsley looked at the adults falling apart, then at the children practically foaming with excitement, and finally turned to the three Aurors beside him.
"Get these children back inside first."
He spoke with a note of helplessness in his voice.
"Thank you, thank you, gentlemen. These little ones can't tell the difference between stories and reality. They've heard too many fantasy tales, and at a time like this they don't even know enough to be afraid."
"Iain's told them too many stories," Mrs. Hawke said at once, thanking them profusely. On a night this terrifying, a few grown men were exactly the sort of help her instincts clung to.
"Who's Iain?"
Kingsley was merely curious about the one responsible for blessing all these children with supernatural courage, but the question hit one of Iain's most sensitive nerves.
The way pressing a tiny button at the wrong moment could trigger a national crisis.
"Fight the zombies! Fight the zombies!"
On the surface, Iain kept chanting along with the children, holding his pitchfork high while the paper crown trembled in the night wind.
But inside, his heart had climbed all the way into his throat.
Over the span of just a few seconds, his emotions went through another violent upheaval.
And it was too violent.
So violent that he did not even realize that the triggering and resonance of magic was tied to emotion.
Out on the street, Aunt Mary stopped singing "Silent Night."
Her jawbone began moving again with a dry clacking sound.
Then from the body of a woman dead for years came a rough, desiccated voice.
"Fight... the... zombies..."
Granny Clara followed.
"Fight... the... zombies..."
Old Mr. Lewis's lips moved too.
"Fight... the... zom... bies..."
Across several streets, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of reanimated corpses raised their shriveled arms at the same time. Those grey-white hands, some bare skeleton, some wrapped in dried skin, all pointed upward beneath the weak streetlamps, moving in grotesque synchrony with the cookware and gardening tools raised by the children.
"Fight the zombies! Fight the zombies! Fight the zombies!"
The dead shouted.
The exact same words as Iain.
The exact same rhythm.
"..."
At that moment,
Iain felt a little dead inside.
For about five seconds, an exquisitely awkward atmosphere settled over the street.
Then Kingsley's voice split the night, carrying a strain of shock and alarm unlike anything Iain had heard from him before.
"Everyone on guard! That black wizard is watching us!"
Four wands rose at once.
Their tips flashed in the darkness.
Kingsley's gaze swept like a searchlight over walls, windows, and rooftops, raking the buildings wildly in search of a hidden enemy.
"Their sticks are glowing!"
"Are they really exorcists?"
"Oh no, they might be priests!"
Under the stunned gaze of the adults, the Aurors began working in practiced coordination, casting spells and searching for traces of the "mastermind" behind it all.
"Where is he? That cunning black wizard is hiding himself too well!"
Failing to find a target, Kingsley shouted in frustration, his voice rising above both the children's uproar and the rasping cries of the dead.
Not being able to locate the enemy placed immense pressure on the other three Aurors as well.
"Uh..."
Iain stood there, still holding his pitchfork, his crown still crooked on his head.
Then he began slowly edging backward behind the other children, using his short height to disappear into the crowd.
Thank heaven for the ancient art of blending in.
Just as Iain's brain worked itself into a frenzy trying to figure out how to calm this disaster and somehow transform the whole thing into a misunderstanding,
a cry rang out.
Clear and piercing.
It tore through the night sky.
The sound resembled no bird in existence. It was like someone had forged moonlight into a silver string, then plucked a single note from it.
Everyone froze.
The children. The Aurors.
Even the resurrected dead.
For one instant, all of them fell still before that call.
Then blazing fire lit up the street.
It burst into existence in the middle of the road like an inverted flower in bloom, each petal unfurling outward as a curved arc of flame.
At the very center of that flower of fire, the silhouette of a bird could be seen clearly.
A phoenix.
Or more precisely, a creature reborn through flame.
It appeared from nowhere, slowly folding its wings as the fire drew inward, and from within the receding flames stepped a calm figure.
Albus Dumbledore.
He raised his wand.
The motion was as effortless as watering flowers in his own garden.
"Finite Incantatem."
In the next instant, Aunt Mary stopped moving.
Granny Clara closed her hollow eye sockets.
Old Mr. Lewis shut his mouth, though even in undeath he had remained just as unable to carry a tune.
One after another, corpse after corpse, all the dead who had crawled out of the earth lost whatever force had been holding them upright and collapsed to the ground in that wash of golden light.
Like falling dominoes.
Like dandelion seeds blown apart by the wind.
The orphanage yard fell quiet once more, as the powerful magic laid over the place was truly and ruthlessly dispersed.
Iain could feel that, inside his mind, the glowing rune was still glowing.
But no more magic was feeding into it now...
as though something had blocked the flow and cut him off from it.
At the same time,
"Good evening, gentlemen. Ladies."
Dumbledore used his voice to draw everyone's attention, though his eyes had already moved past them all, reflecting in his pupils the slow distortion of the world back into its original shape.
Clearly, Dumbledore's single Finite Incantatem had not only dispelled Iain's ancient magic.
It had also stripped away another spell that had already been laid over the place.
A Confundus Charm powerful enough to blur reality itself.
On the orphanage sign, the letters began rearranging themselves as the enchantment dissolved.
The name that had read Solow Orphanage gradually shifted into a different arrangement.
Wool's Orphanage
Wool's Orphanage.
"Mr. Shacklebolt, if you don't mind, I would prefer to handle the situation here myself."
Dumbledore's expression never changed.
As though he had known from the beginning exactly what was going to happen.