It’s not the first time Harry’s been stabbed, of course. There was that case in Brixton the year before last, an escaped Death Eater holed up in a Muggle apartment not unlike Harry’s own; Harry went in without backup and the bastard stuck him through the shoulder with a fire poker, which was a bitch to fight through and even worse to heal. There was that time in the alley with the invisibility cloak and the lumens, too, and another one with a toasting fork when he was a Junior Auror, during what should have been a routine domestic dispute call. He’s no stranger to it, the rush of shock and adrenaline, the way the pain starts sharp and breathtaking and then seems to settle out over his whole body—it’s not the sort of thing you et, no matter how long it’s been since your last go-round.

It is the first time he’s ever been stabbed when he wasn’t at least vaguely expecting it, though. It’s the first time his constant vigilance has let him down.

Harry reaches for his wand, but it’s not in his pocket, and he swears. He’s not frightened, even though he knows he should be—this is their M.O., these thieves who have been making Draco miserable all these months, who attacked Hermione in the street. They’vee for him and they’re better than he is, they’ve gotten away from him twice and left him with a string of crimes he couldn’t solve, he’s wounded and wandless, and he should be terrified.

Mostly, he’s just angry. Mostly, he’s just thinking that these bastards hurt Hermione, hurt Draco, and even if it kills him, he’s going to make them pay.

He turns, only stumbling a little, and—

“Professor Slughorn?” Harry says.

He blinks, because—because that can’t be right. Because after all these weeks of searching and puzzling and taking the pieces apart and putting them back together again, the answer cannot be—it just cannot be—Horace fucking Slughorn. He doesn’t fit the profile; he doesn’t so much as share a body type with any of the glamoured professionals Harry’s encountered over the course of this case, and anyway he’s too old to have been one of them, even if he had managed to hold a shape-changing full body glamour one or both of those times. God, Harry took a meeting with him in the very beginning, he’s an official departmental consultant, they went over the notes of the case and he was—well, obsequious, like he always is, but not—not a fucking criminal mastermind! It can’t be Slughorn, because it doesn’t make any sense for it to be Slughorn. Because Harry would have figured that out by now.

On the other hand, there is the very damning evidence of the knife he just stuck in Harry’s back, so.

“Harry, my boy,” Slughorn says, his voice warm and congenial, like Harry’s standing in front of him in a queue instead of dripping blood on Draco’s tile floors. “Please. It’s Horace.”

“I think it’s fuck you, actually,” Harry says. He reaches around behind him to try and assess how badly he’s hurt; the knife is still in the wound, and when he jostles it by ident pain screams through his entire body. He takes a slightly shuddering breath and pulls his hand away, finds his fingerse back wet with blood. “What—you—how did you even get in here?”

“Oh, Harry,” Slughorn says, with a little laugh. “You remember my talent for housebreaking, don’t you? Learned out of necessity, of course, perfectly vulgar to do it for sport, but I did get rather good at it in those years I was on the run. I started out with just Muggle places, but a man does miss his creatureforts; by the time you and Albus found me, I was in Wizarding homes about half the time. The trick, you see, is toe in when the wards are allowing guests, and then simply hide yourself until your timing is right. I came in with the last round of the museum guests on Friday, and then spent an instructive weekend as a neglected settee in the second floor sitting room.” He leers at Harry a little, voice threaded through with mocking pity. “I saw your little display with Mr. Malfoy, you know. So sweet. So touching. So sad, the way it’s all going to end in such tragedy.”

“Is this supposed to be scaring me?” Harry demands. He tries to make it sound unruffled, like he’s just having a normal chat with a normal criminal, even though halfway through he has to brace himself on the counter just to say upright. “Because, to be totally honest, it’s mostly just pissing me off. You’d’ve been better off killing me up front.”

“Who’s trying to kill you?” Slughorn says. He twirls Harry’s wand between his fingers, a gesture that registers distantly for Harry as familiar, important. He’s having a little trouble keeping his thoughts in order. “I mean, if you die, then you die, though of course I would be very sorry to lose you, Harry. You always did have such an enormous amount of promise. It’s a shame, really, that it came along with so little self-control.”

“Oh, bite me,” Harry snaps.

Slughorn smiles. “I think I’ve already done all I’ll need to do to you, Harry. You see, I don’t want you to die, although, again, I doubt I’ll lose much sleep if you do. You, my boy, are simply the perfect bait. I don’t need you to die; I need you to bleed, so that Mr. Malfoy willing running. Him…” and here Slughorn shrugs, a little smile playing at the edges of his mouth. “Well, him I’ll admit I intend to kill.”

Harry doesn’t think. He just acts, throwing himself at Slughorn with a cry of rage, one fist in the air. He might be wandless and injured but that doesn’t make him helpless, and Slughorn is old, anyway; Harry doesn’t need magic to take him. Harry doesn’t need magic to beat him until he’s too bruised and battered to so much as look at Draco the wrong way, let alone murder him in his own house.

Except, as it turns out, he does. Except Slughorn waves his wand and says, “Protego,” almost lazily, and Harry’s closed fist hits the solid wall of the Shield Charm instead of his hideously, unbearably smug face. The impact causes such an intense burst of pain from the wound on Harry’s back that he cries out, that he almost blacks out—he falls to his knees, pulling in hissing breaths through gritted teeth, and holds onto consciousness with everything in him while he waits for the worst of it to pass.

“It’s like I said,” Harry hears Slughorn say, as if from a great distance. “You’re just not very good at this, my boy. I blame Albus, I really do. I’m sure that needing a war weapon is all well and good, but he might have made sure you learned some critical thinking skills, just in case you did manage to survive.” He sighs, a fond, wistful sort of sound. “Ah, Albus. Now there was a man who knew how to keep the grease on the wheel, if you know what I’m saying—but, wait, who am I talking to? Of course you don’t. Your type took over after the war, didn’t you? You and Ron Weasley, and Kingsley Shacklebolt, and Reba Erhard, and that Hermione Granger, who might be the worst of the lot. Idiot children, all of you. You expect people to do the right thing just for the sake of it. You think you can really run a government with clean hands.” His voice and eyes go hard. “No more little favors. No more inside connections. And you really think people are just going to play along!”

“It’s been working out for us pretty well so far,” Harry says, looking up at him through his hair and boiling over, seething with rage. “Is that what this is about, then? You want to exact revenge on—what, on Draco Malfoy, because nobody’s bringing you—crystal pineapples, or whatever, anymore? That’s insane! That doesn’t even make sense!”

“Of course it doesn’t, Harry,” Slughorn says, tone genuinely pitying this time. “Because it’s not what I’m doing. This thing between Mr. Malfoy and I is about the houses, pure and simple. I was only saying.”

“The houses?” Harry’s starting to feel more than a little woozy, and Slughorn must be able to see it; he laughs, and shakes his head.

“Look at me, standing here chatting as if I don’t have things to do,” Slughorn says. He pockets Harry’s wand, and something about the way he does it, the continuation of the little twirling motion from before—

“You were,” Harry says slowly. “You were the woman, in that first break-in. And at the second, you were—that guy—” He stops, trying to think through the static crowding his mind, the ringing in his ears. “You used Polyjuice and glamours, didn’t you? Why would you—”

“To throw you off track, obviously,” Slughorn says, and sighs. “It’s just not the right job for you, I’m afraid. Don’t you worry; if you do survive this, I’ll Obliviate the whole experience away, and we’ll start you over as something else. You’ll be so grateful, of course, to have been saved from a brutal attempted murder-suicide at the hands of a former Death Eater, that you’ll do whatever I say. A professional Quidditch player, perhaps. That would keep you in the papers, you know, and in plenty of favors, and I’m sure Gwenog would be happy to show you some tricks—”

“You and Gwenog Jones can both go to hell,” Harry says, fear striking him for the first time at the thought of Slughorn trying to keep him like a trained animal. It’s not that Harry’s worried he’ll actually fall victim to it—Harry could throw off an Imperius at fourteen—but the idea that he could wake up in St. Mungo’s, with Draco dead—with no memory of Draco—thinking that Draco tried to kill him—

“Maybe I will let you die,” Slughorn snaps.

Harry tries to keep the relief out of his face, his voice, which he keeps mild as he says, “Guess I’ll see you in hell, then.” Slughorn scowls at him, and Harry grins back, slow and vicious. “You better hope I do die, Horace. Because if I live, and you’ve killed him? I swear to god I’ll send you there myself.”

Slughorn goes, and Harry’s not sure how long he sits there, on the floor. He knows he tries to stand and doesn’t quite make it, pulls himself part of the way up and then slumps back down against a cab. He knows he looks down at a little puddle of his own blood and laughs, even though it hurts, because,

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