Prologue
I stepped through the barrier to platform nine and three quarters, inhaling the familiar scent of the last five minutes before the Hogwarts express left. I'd always found human capacity for stress astounding. They had very little – one overdue assignment or gas bill and they were off.
"Charlie!"
I smiled to myself and turned to face one of the worst offenders. Rachel Macallister was a short, blond witch with a huge personality and a boyfriend to die for who, predictably, was standing just behind her smiling his slow smile. I waved and wheeled my heavy trolley over to the two of them.
"Come on Lottie, hurry up, the train leaves in five minutes and Oliver isn't even here yet." She wrung her hands together as she urged me forward.
Peter and I shared a wry look. She was always like this just before the train left. I had a feeling Oliver was late every year on purpose.
"Calm down Rachel." I soothed, whistling a note and levitating my trunk into the outstretched hands of the surprised baggage handler. "He'll be here."
"I know, but I can't help but wonder if this is the year he misses it you know?" She mused as she swung herself onto the train.
Peter rolled his eyes at me and grinned.
"I have it on good authority he's waiting just outside." He said dryly before following his fussing girlfriend.
I grinned to myself and decided to wait for him. Rachel and Peter would find an empty compartment and at least Oliver would know the general location of our seat without having to walk through the entire length of the train.
I sighed as I realised this would be the last time I would ever do this. It was my seventh and final year; I was of age and in a little under a year I would be firmly ensconced in a wizarding University medicine program. Of course, when I had expressed interest, the university had snapped me up immediately. Elfin healers were hard to come by and I was guaranteed a job after the four years of training. It was the music that made us so special. We had an affinity with the way things worked so to speak and, with just a well tuned and simple song, could heal practically every malady anybody had ever thought of.
"Hey Charlie." A voice said jovially at my elbow with a thick Scottish brogue.
I grinned and turned around to face my best friend… at least that was the original plan. I ended up looking at a rather… muscly chest which was most definitely not attached to the weedy little boy I had said goodbye to at the beginning of the summer. I tilted my head back and stared at his face. It was Oliver… and yet it wasn't… I narrowed my eyes.
"Alright, who are you and what have you done with my best friend?" I demanded.
Oliver merely grinned before lifting his heavy trunk as though it were a feather and handing it to the baggage handler.
"You know, if you take that determination to get into Puddlemere any further, you're going to explode." I commented.
Oliver laughed.
"You're as bad as my mother did you know that?"
"I happen to get along very well with your Mum." I said indignantly.
"Well as long as you don't go around sprouting comments to your significantly wealthy and giggly friends about how I'm a 'late developer' I'll be happy and pretend I didn't hear you give her a compliment."
"Giggly?" I asked, raising a slanted eyebrow.
"Trust me, women over forty should not giggle."
"I think I'll take that a step further and declare that any woman of any age should never giggle." I agreed, sighing as we walked past a group of fourth years doing exactly that at the sight of the handsome boy wandering obliviously past in the narrow corridor.
Wait… handsome?
We found Rachel and Peter and stopped outside the compartment with a grimace as the sounds of definitely feminine giggling reached our ears.
"Should we even go there?" I asked him, a smile tugging at the corners of my mouth.
"Let's not."
I grinned and opened the door, trying to hide my smile as Rachel and Peter sprung apart with slightly sheepish expressions.
"Break it up kids." I told them, moving to put my duffel bag on one of the luggage shelves above our heads.
Rachel made a face at me.
"If it wasn't for the whole immortality thing I'd call you immature."
I sighed, barely concealing a grimace. It was funny how humans managed to construe that immortality was a good thing. I unconsciously fingered the diamond-shaped jewel hanging from my neck and frowned. I was only seventeen and was still considered an infant by my people's standard. My father himself was at least nine hundred years old while my mother was almost six hundred. While we didn't live forever, it seemed like it. The oldest any Elf had lived to was just under a millennium. Most elves secluded themselves from the human world for that very reason. Not many humans understood the difficulties of our age expectations. To us, human life seemed to go by in a heartbeat and there have been too many tragic human-elfin love stories around to encourage the practise.
There was, however, one major plus in the whole affair. Over one hundred years ago, my family had developed a complex piece of enchantment to allow one of their daughters, a girl named Laura, to leave the immortal lines and join her human true love for a brief stay in the rollercoaster of life. The secret lay in the jewel I, and every Elf from my family, wore around my neck. If I ever found a human I would never want to part from I would just have to give him that necklace, my star, and I would become mortal and live only slightly longer than the average human.
I never really understood why anybody would want to live for that short a time but as I grew older, and grew closer to my friends, I began to sort of see what persuaded Laura to die so early. I didn't want to lose any of my friends and yet I knew I would have to watch them grow old and die. It wasn't a prospect I was particularly looking forward to and so I tended to spend as much time as I possibly could with them and found myself very quick to apologise to any of them if we so much as fought for a second.
"Earth the Charlotte… come back from Elf land…"
I jumped a little and looked up at Oliver's smiling face.
"Sorry, just thinking." I told them, smiling reassuringly.
"You've been doing a lot of that lately," Rachel noticed with a frown, "are you ok?"
I shrugged and whistled absently for my morning tea.
"I'm fine." I said, unwrapping the green leaves from the packet of never-ending elfin chocolate my parents had given me before I left, and taking a bite.
"If that's what I think it is, give some here." Oliver said, his eyes lighting up.
Elfin chocolate was renowned throughout the wizarding world as being the best, and people were always pestering us for the recipe. Honeydukes had once offered my mother a very large sum of money to supply the sweets to their shop, but like every other Elf before her, she had politely declined.
I rolled my eyes at my friend and broke off a small square for everyone in the compartment.
"You could have at least said please." I admonished, the corners of my mouth twitching.
Oliver shrugged around his chocolate and mumbled something about it not being as much fun.
The final whistle blew and I smiled as parents began running alongside the train, calling out to their children to be good and mind the Bloody Baron. My parents had only ever come to the station once in my seven years of schooling and that had only been to show me where to go. They were amazingly busy people; my father worked for the ministry as the head of the Department for Magical creatures and my mother was head of the Elfin contingent at St Mungos. I didn't mind much at all as I knew they both loved me very much, having waited for me for most of their lives. They made as much time as they could for me and we had our disagreements yes, but all in all I did love them.
I had always found it interesting that they had chosen to send me to Hogwarts instead of the Elfin school somewhere in Northern France. I was the first full-blooded Elf to set foot in the human school in at least fifty years and many of the elders in our community relied on me to inform them of the latest news in the human world. I guessed the main reason I attended the school was because of my gift with healing that I had inherited from my mother and my parents were doing everything they could to cultivate it and prepare me for constant association with humans which I would not pick up from the Elfin school. It was kind of disappointing that the only Elves I knew were about fifty years older than I was but I had learned to deal with it, reminding myself that in Elfin terms, fifty years wasn't really all that much time.
"Where are you going Oliver?"
I was jolted out of my reverie by Peter's question and I realised Oliver was standing at the door of the compartment.
"Quidditch." Rachel and I said in unison just before he opened his mouth.
Oliver glared at the both of us as we collapsed into laughter at his predictability before stalking huffily out of the compartment.
To say Oliver was Quidditch obsessed would be the biggest understatement of the year, but contrary to popular belief, he didn't live and breathe the game. He'd found out in fifth year when he'd become captain that any Quidditch-related conversation in the presence of Rachel and I would result in him having to duck low-flying objects and having to endure the cold shoulder for a month. He generally kept his Captainly speeches for the Quidditch pitch and only ever showed just how obsessed he really was before a game when he tended to collapse in a pile of nerves – not unlike myself just before a performance.
If Oliver was Quidditch obsessed, I was a music nerd. All Elves were really. Our entire form of magic revolved around magic and the lot of us had perfect pitch. I was constantly fawned over by Hogwarts' music professor and had, for some reason, agreed to take music extension as a NEWT subject. Amongst humans, I was considered somewhat of a musical prodigy, playing practically every single instrument imaginable without really having had extensive lessons, and being able to compose complex pieces of music in about an hour. Amongst Elves, I was considered merely talented which was most likely a good thing as in my first year, my head had swelled to about twice its usual size until I went home and talked to my cousin who had merely raised an eyebrow and proceeded to shoot down all of my convincing arguments on the development of human music while he was playing the sitar… but then Lawrence was always a bit mental.
I turned from staring out the window to look over at Peter and Rachel. They were asleep, Rachel with her head on Peter's shoulder and snoring slightly. I smiled fondly and whistled softly for my book, opening to a dog-eared page and beginning to read. It would be a long time until Oliver got back.
I awoke to a deep chill on the air. I sat up and absently caught my book as it slipped off my chest. I looked out at the window and frowned. It was dark and there were frost patterns creeping over the glass.
I glanced around the compartment and kicked Oliver's shin gently. He opened his brown eyes groggily and shook his head a little to clear it. I watched as he took in the strangeness of the surroundings.
"What's going on?" He asked, moving opposite me to peer out the window. "We're not moving." He noticed, looking up with a jolt as the lights flickered.
"I know." I agreed. "Something's not right."
He stood with a frown and moved over to the door, sliding it open and peering out into the corridor. The door slammed shut of its own accord and he was thrown back into his seat.
"What the?" He murmured standing and attempting to open the jammed door. "It's locked!" he exclaimed incredulously.
"What?" I asked incredulously, jumping up to test it myself.
Somehow the compartment door had locked itself.
"Something is definitely not right." I said, sliding back into my seat.
"Where are Peter and Rachel?" He asked me, turning to peer out the window again, watching the frost patterns with increasing worry.
"I don't know, I only just woke up." I said, suddenly realising they weren't there. "They probably just went to grab something from the lunch lady." I reasoned.
We sat in silence for a few seconds staring out the window in an attempt to see what was going on.
"There's something moving out there!" I exclaimed, jumping back from the window as a dark shape floated past.
"What on earth is going on?" Oliver exclaimed as the lights flickered once more then died completely.
I shivered and rubbed my hands together to try and get some life back into my long fingers.
"I have no idea, but we can't really do anything about it at the moment can we?" I reasoned, calming him down a little.
We both jumped as the door to the compartment clicked audibly and began to slide open seemingly on its own. I stared out past the door and gasped, shrinking back into my seat to get away from the thing at the opening. The dementor poked its head around the door frame and scoped the place out, its unseen eyes coming to rest on Oliver for a second. He seemed to shiver violently and close his eyes, shaking his head from side to side as though he was seeing something I couldn't.
I closed my eyes as I heard a soft tune float in on the air of the cabin. The song grew in intensity and I realised with a jolt that it was me that was singing. I had no idea where the music was coming from and I'd never heard the song before in my life but I suddenly knew what I was doing and poured all of my happiness and contentment into the song and tried very hard not to waver when the dementor wheeled around to face me. This had happened before – all Elves experienced their magic taking over at least once in their lives so I wasn't particularly startled. A soft glow began to grow around me and spread out through the cabin. The dementor screamed and beat a hasty retreat out through the door. I stood, still singing and slammed it shut with a bang.
The song stopped but I liked it so much I walked back to my seat humming the tune softly, my fingers itching for some of my trusty manuscript. Oliver wordlessly reached up for my bag, pulled out my music book and handed it to me, a cryptic expression on his face.
"You ok?" I asked him, pausing with my pencil poised on top of the pad.
Oliver looked at me for a second then sighed.
"Yes, fine."
I frowned at him for a second but let it go, turning back to my manuscript and scribbling out the tune, humming all the while.