Kapitel 1

Dreams of Commotion

"This is wrong, you guys!" whispered Callie urgently. "We are going to get into so much trouble! Detention will be the least of it!"

But the short, blonde girl's sensible input was thoroughly ignored. Her two companions were too wrapped up in their low-pitched discussion to even hear what she was saying – all the while the gargoyle in front of them stood as stone still as could be expected, though definitely not as was preferred.

"Firebolt Ultima – Wronski feint – come on, James, we'll never guess it! Can't we just bombardio the thing away?"

"Holyhead Harpies – are you mental? The blast would wake the entire castle! Besides, don't you think Professor Johnson's got her office better guarded than that, huh? Chudley Cannons. Did you know, that's my uncle Ron's favourite team."

"Really? But they lose everything…"

"Tell me about it."

Callie abandoned her post behind the empty armour at the far end of the corridor and scurried back towards her reckless friends as quickly and quietly as possible. "Can we please focus on the part about getting into more trouble than galleons can buy? Come on," she implored the black-haired and bespectacled boy, because he was the most likely to listen, "she said it herself – we'll never guess it!"

"Not with that attitude, we won't," Mathilda stated, tossing a lock of her brown and curly hair off her shoulder. She turned towards the stone gargoyle and tapped on it with her knuckles. "We gotta keep going! Puddlemere United, Falmouth Falcons – come on, help me out!"

Beside her, James shrugged. "I guess we might as well go through all the British and Irish teams, just in case…"

Callie opened her mouth to protest, but just then, the gargoyle let out a heartfelt moan. All three children jumped.

"Did we get it?" Mathilda gasped.

The stone monster groaned again and split its mouth open with a crunching sound. "You most certainly did not!" it rumbled dramatically. "But the prospect of listening to you trying to guess the password all night…"

"Then just tell us!" Mathilda injected smartly. "Tell us, and we'll be out of your hair – uh, gravel – whatever – in no time at all!"
"As if no one's ever tried that one before," said the gargoyle snidely.

"Oh, that's it! Bombar–"

"No!" James and Callie yelled in unison. They simultaneously threw themselves at Mathilda, and half a second later, they were all lying tangled up on the floor, while Mathilda's unfinished spell bounced from her wand and down the corridor, ricocheting off of the stone walls until, finally, it struck the armour that Callie had been keeping lookout behind moments before. With a crash fit to wake the dead, the iron pieces tumbled to the ground.

A beat of silence followed.

Then Callie whimpered. "Oh gosh. Oh boy."

"Oh no!"

Footsteps could be heard now, drawing rapidly nearer. A loud, clear voice called from around the corner, "Who's there?"

James shot to his feet, urged on by Mathilda's frantic whispers of, "Get the cloak! Get the cloak!" In one quick motion, he grabbed a large silvery cloth from where he had abandoned it on the floor ten minutes ago and tossed it over himself and the two girls, just as a person rounded the corner. Now invisible to the naked eye, James, Mathilda, and Callie very carefully stepped away from the stone gargoyle. James noted with some annoyance that it looked rather amused for a supposedly unmovable piece of stone.

But his attention was immediately diverted back to his friends' and his main concern; the professor who had just stepped into view. If the cloak had been soundproof, too, James would have moaned out loud. Possibly the strictest teacher of the entire faculty, the tall, ethnic looking Professor Tameri, was standing stock still right in front of the invisble threesome, staring straight through them at the pile of metal in the other end of the corridor. The light from the torches on the wall made her eyes glitter eerily. James felt Callie's hand clenching around the fabric of his shirt, but her hold shifted instantly to a death grip around his arm when Professor Tameri carefully drew her wand.

With a flick of her wrist, Tameri rapped the gargoyle right between its eyes. The thing came to life with a headshake.

"That hurts my feelings, you know," it mumbled.

Professor Tameri appeared unmoved. "Have any students passed by here?"

"Hundreds of students pass by here every day."

"Yes, but within the last few minutes?"

"Oh. Well, yes."

James's heart leapt to his throat where it thudded like mad.

"Who?"

The gargoyle shrugged as good as any gargoyle can. "Can't tell. You all look alike to me."

A frown creased the smooth forehead of the copper skinned witch. "Tell me, gargoyle. Did they try to pass you?"

"Why yes, they did! And not very well, either. One of them even tried to blow me up." The thing sighed and scratched some shrapnel off its chest with a set of giant claws. "Rather foolish behaviour, I think you will agree."

Mathilda crossed her arms and let out the smallest huff of air.

Half a second later, Tameri had spun on her high heel, facing the three, though not aware of it – yet, James added darkly. The silence was ringing in James' ears, as Tameri's eyes searched the corridor intently. He hardly dared to breathe.

Tameri raised her wand slowly. "Homenum reve–"

But the tension – and whatever spell Tameri was uttering – broke when, from seemingly nowhere (though James guessed that the hidden passage behind a tapestry in the adjacent corridor might have something to do with it), a small, if not tiny man came hustling forth, waving his lumos-lit wand back and forth with vigour.

"Students!" he yelled with a squeaky voice, "I know you're–!"

Then his eyes caught sight of Tameri. "Oh! Professor! I didn't… did you make that noise?"

"Of course not," Tameri deadpanned, lowering her wand and easing her stand, to the intense relief of the trio beneath the Invisibility Cloak. "I came here to find the culprits, same as you."

"Oh! Well, then. Have you found them?"

Tameri allowed a moment of silence to pass, a moment which the newly arrived man – the janitor, Lester Lesskettle – spent on noticing that the corridor appeared to be completely deserted sans the professor and himself.

"No," Tameri then emphasized.

James felt Mathilda shudder with a barely concealed giggle, and jabbed at her with his elbow, not surprised, but certainly miffed that she had come so close to revealing them. On the other side of James, Callie's grip was cutting off the blood-circulation in his arm.

"R-right," stuttered Lesskettle and drew his hand nervously through his hair, something he did so often that muggleborns were prone to assume he was fond of flying kites in thunder storms. Then, in a wildly transparent attempt at creating conversation, he shakily asked, "So, what, uh… I wonder what they were doing here, anyway?"

"Trying to get to the Headmistress's office, for whatever reason. They failed, however, unsurprisingly."

Lesskettle laughed weakly. "Unsurprisingly, yes, indeed. Who would ever guess that the password is snitches and quaffles? It's too easy! I – whoops!"

The gargoyle had just sprung to life again and moved to bare the entranceway for the office.

Professor Tameri fisted her hands tightly, and by the look of her face, she seemed to be gritting her teeth, too, all the while Lesskettle was tattling away about "accidents" and "all's good when no harm's done, eh", and other such things.

Finally, Tameri cut through sternly: "In any case, hopefully they haven't gone far. I came from the same way as you, so that leaves only two corridors they could have taken. You take one, I'll take the other." And she was off, the heels of her boots rapping against the floor. Lesskettle hurried after.

"Yes, brilliant idea, professor! I –"

A loud meow cut him short, and the tiny man gasped.

"Madame Norris! Where are you when I need you? There are students on the loose – oh, don't give me that look – no, no, there's no one down there, kitty, that's where I just came from! Now, this way –"

In a matter of minutes, silence had fallen once again in the corridor.

Before the clacking noises of boot heels and the hissing of the disgruntled Madame Norris had even faded entirely, Mathilda was out from under the cloak, her face alight with glee. "Snitches and quaffles! Ha!" she exclaimed. "It's true, we never would have guessed something so simple!"

"Keep your voice down!" hissed Callie, also appearing from beneath the cloak as if from thin air. Her voice was shriller than usually. "Do you have any idea what would have happened if they'd found us?!"

"Attempt at breaking and entering the Headmistress's office… I'd say 100 points each and four full weeks of detention," James mused out loud. "At the very least."

"But they didn't!" said Mathilda. "And now we have the password!"

Callie sputtered wildly. "You can't honestly want to go through with this! After what just happened?"

"It was sign!"

"Honestly, Callie, you're not going to quit on us now, are you?" James raised his eyebrows with a grin, unknowingly making said girl's heart beat faster. "You're the one who woke up an hour ago and told us, or Mathilda anyway, that it was crucial we got a hold of the Sorting Hat. Well, the Sorting Hat is in the Headmistress's office, isn't it?"

"I… I…" Callie grappled after something to say, searching her brain for some evasive tactic. "I say a lot of stuff when I wake up from deep sleep."

"Yeah," Mathilda added with a smirk, "and most of it's true, too."

Callie didn't answer for a while. She was unsure of what to say. How do you explain waking up in the middle of the night, having already forgotten your vivid dream, but knowing – beyond a shred of doubt – exactly what needs to be done, even if you don't know why? James had once told Callie about his infamous father's meeting with a curious potion called Felix Felicis. Callie had recognised the feelings he described – the assuredness, the bone-deep knowledge about which way to go – as the same she had after one of those dreams, dreams she hardly ever remembered. But much like regular dreams, the longer she stayed awake, the more the certainty faded away. And what was left in its wake was nothing but confusion and doubt.

And in this case, a butt-load of trouble.

Right now, Callie felt the best thing to do was back out before she effectively blew Gryffindor's chances of winning the House Cup this year. Rawenclaw had been on the receiving end of that prize for two years in a row now, and they were becoming increasingly and exponentially cocky about it. If she, Mathilda, and James got into trouble this early in the year, there would be no catching up to the other Houses, and Gryffindor would probably trot in as dead-last in the House Cup race, come summer.

But there was something gnawing at the back of her mind. Callie couldn't deny it. She didn't know what possessed her to want to go into the Headmistress's office and steal the Sorting Hat – heck, the more she thought about it, the more she thought they could all get expelled for it – but then again, she put her faith in magic all the time, and she didn't know how that worked, either. The fact of the matter was that, rationality be damned, she just couldn't turn her back on this. It felt wrong.

So finally, she nodded sombrely. "Alright, guys," she said, steeling herself as much as possible. "Let's do this."

Both Mathilda and James looked astounded, but Mathilda recovered first. "That's the spirit! Now – snitches and quaffles!"

The gargoyle leapt aside.

A/N: Re-upload to fix some minor mistakes. This maaaay happen again, as this is a work in progress. Sorry for the confusion!