With business concluded, Cassandra invited Tom to stay for dinner. He declined with a smile.
"Another time. I still have things that need handling."
"Next time we meet will probably be next summer," Tom added. "I'll be expecting a pleasant surprise."
Cassandra didn't want him to go, but nodded sensibly. "I promise I'll give you something to be genuinely impressed by."
"I'll look forward to it."
He raised a hand in farewell, and disappeared into green flame. Cassandra stood staring at the fireplace for a long while after, until a thought surfaced that she hadn't considered before.
Why next summer? Wasn't there still the Underage Wizards Dueling Championship?
Did Tom think she wouldn't make it?
...
Arizona. The Thunderbird Sanctuary.
Tom hadn't gone back to New York. He had made his way instead to the sanctuary to visit the Thunderbirds.
This wasn't purely a social call. He intended to bring a few back with him. There was a canyon near Newt's property, seldom visited by anyone, that would be perfectly suited for keeping Thunderbirds. He planned to build a house out there after he returned, somewhere to have company during the holidays. Lure Nicolas over eventually, and it would be properly lively.
When Tom mentioned wanting to take some of the young Thunderbirds, the adults in the colony raised absolutely no objection. If anything, they seemed to want him to take more. Several of them, reading between the lines, appeared to be quietly hoping he'd just pack up the entire colony and go.
Unfortunately, that wasn't something Tom could do without consequences. Taking every single Thunderbird out of North America would send MACUSA into a spiral, they were the emblematic creature of the entire region. You said "Thunderbird" to any wizard outside North America and their mind went straight here.
...
Late at night, Tom lay stretched out across the back of a Thunderbird, looking up at the stars, and pulled out his WhatsApp notebook.
[Tom: Do you have the Graves family's address?]
The reply came quickly.
[Rouse: You're going after the Graves? What happened?]
Tom relayed the recent confrontation, keeping it brief.
[Rouse: Absolute death wish... the nerve of him to provoke you... I have Robert's address. Fair warning though, the Graves family is large, multiple branches, very spread out. Robert is the current head of the family, lives at the ancestral estate. How many people will actually be there, I honestly can't say.]
[Tom: That's fine. Three or five is no shortage. Several dozen is no problem either. Just send me the address.]
It arrived shortly after.
Tom closed the notebook and murmured the word quietly to himself.
"Nebraska?"
He had expected somewhere coastal. This country had fifty states, but given the geography, close to ninety percent of the population concentrated along the two great coastal corridors, east and west. Wizards followed the same distribution. Outside of special cases like the Thunderbird Sanctuary, the interior rarely hosted any significant wizarding settlements.
So why had an old immigrant family like the Graves chosen to plant their ancestral seat in a place like this?
Tom tucked the question away and decided he'd find the answer himself tomorrow.
A gentleman could wait ten years for revenge. Tom Riddle found ten days an imposition.
Especially since a mosquito had clearly developed the impression that it was allowed to bite him.
He had been too quiet for too long. Too low a profile, and look what that had invited. Random cats and dogs wandering up to poke the tiger. So this time Tom would not be borrowing Grindelwald's network, or the Saints' resources, or anyone else's influence. He would handle the Graves family personally.
Whatever storm followed, he would weather it himself.
And if it truly became untenable, there was always the option of transferring to Durmstrang as a third-year. Grindelwald had been looking for a reason to make his move on that school anyway.
...
The following morning, with two young Thunderbirds secured in his case, Tom set out for Nebraska and the Graves family's ancestral grounds.
Around midday, he arrived at the address Rouse had sent him.
It was a stretch of barren hills. Not a soul in sight. No structures visible anywhere.
Tom stood there, case in hand, and activated his Magical Sight. Almost immediately, streams of magical energy came into view, moving in patterns too regular to be natural, tracing the outline of something deliberately constructed. He exhaled slowly.
"Good. Not a Fidelius Charm."
If the Graves family had used the Fidelius Charm to conceal their location, he would have had no straightforward way through. It was one of the few genuinely troublesome pieces of magic. But families of the Graves' standing rarely went to those lengths, they had too many social obligations, too many relationships to maintain, too much coming and going to seal themselves away completely behind something that impenetrable.
Same as all those other families he had dismantled before.
He studied the patterns for a while until the weak point in the ward structure revealed itself. It was meaningfully more sophisticated than what he had encountered from other pureblood families, he'd grant them that. But it was still something he could walk straight through.
Tom didn't move immediately. Instead, he planted a sign in the ground just short of the ward line, its message written in letters the deep, deliberate red of dried blood:
"GRAVES AND DOGS, NO ENTRY."
He fixed the sign in place, then straightened.
The blue light came first, rising behind his eyes like something surfacing from deep water. A faint diamond mark shimmered at the center of his brow, there and almost not there, pulsing in a slow rhythm. And then the sky changed.
Snowflakes began to fall.
They came softly at first, then faster, then in great sweeping curtains of white. Within moments the entire area had vanished beneath a spreading blanket of silence and cold, temperature plunging as though the season had been ripped away and replaced in an instant.
A ring of blue shielding light flickered into existence around the estate perimeter, pushing back against the cold. It held for a few dozen seconds, straining against something it had never been designed to resist, and then came the sound. A deep, structural crack, like ice giving way underfoot.
Tom stepped forward and blew.
A single, quiet breath.
The entire ward shattered. Not dramatically, no explosion, no burst of light. It simply fell apart, piece by piece, dissolving into glittering fragments that drifted upward like snow in reverse, and vanished.
Before him, a vast manor emerged from the white.