The rain did not abate as Friday evening wore on.

By quarter of ten, Fidelma and Edwin were arguing heartily again, over whether women or men, in general, made for better Seekers. In a rare turn of events, the two actually agreed, and they defended their mutual opinion against Twycross, Aspinwall, Kyd, and Freemantle.

Victoire was glad to see that friendship mended, but quietly exited the discussion when the longcase clock near the door struck ten. She hiked up to her dorm, measured out seven drams of aural amplifying drops – about seven hours' worth – into a tumbler of Invigoration Draught, and knocked the drink back in one go. Then she headed down into the Castle to make her rounds.

Tybalt wandered along with Victoire as she patrolled the third floor. He accompanied her as far as the vaulted doors to the courtyard at the base of the Clock Tower, and remained inside the foyer as she put up another Umbrella Charm and trekked out into the storm. The showers had lightened only slightly. Victoire didn't really expect to find anyone outside the Castle in these conditions, but she dutifully, if cursorily, inspected the courtyard, then walked the length of the Covered Bridge all the way to the Stone Circle at the far side of the gorge before turning back.

As she hiked the Bridge back to the school, she couldn't help appreciating the view. In this hellacious weather, the hills to the west of Hogwarts were nearly indistinct smudges; only the ominous peak of the Dragon's Tooth stood out against the sky. Victoire paused on the Bridge, propping herself against the railing to witness the breathtaking panorama, and wondering, not for the first time, at the night's mysterious allure. She could believe in this moment that she was the only human being on Earth, in a time before Time had begun eroding the world.

She shook her head, and laughed at her own wistfulness. Tybalt greeted her at the Clock Tower by nuzzling the top of his head against her shin. Victoire cast a Drying Charm on her shoes, scratched the cat's ears, and the two of them treaded the quiet halls of the third floor.

Shortly after midnight, she made another round, stopping off this time at the Trophy Room. Before she even reached the door, her augmented hearing picked up a soft gasp and light giggle, then a husky groan followed by a male's heavy breathing. Victoire sighed, drew her wand, and quietly tested the door. Firmly fastened. That was fine with her; she banged her fist against the wood a couple of times, then called out, "Prefect. Open the door."

One participant shushed the other, and the girl swore. Under a hurried shuffling and the rustling of clothes, Victoire heard her whisper: "I told you you were being too loud."

"Your fault," the boy answered. Even through the door, Victoire could hear him grinning.

The girl giggled again, and then footsteps approached the other side of the door. Victoire stepped back as it swung open, and wasn't even mildly surprised when Fidelma exited with Theodore Pope close behind her, both of them still looking disheveled and a bit out of breath. Fidelma grinned wickedly when she saw Victoire, and she closed the door behind her.

"As you can see, Miss Thackery," Theo said, smoothing his tie, "contrary to popular belief, several Slytherins have, in fact, been granted the Special Services Award over the years."

Fidelma stared at him for a second, then nodded. "Seems I stand corrected."

"Well, then," Theo nodded back; "good evening to you both." And he headed off down the hall toward the far stairwell that led down to the dungeons and the Slytherin dormitories.

Fidelma watched him go, then said to Victoire in an undertone: "If you wanted to join in, you should have let me know ahead of time."

"Incorrigible," Victoire chided with a laugh. "You're lucky it was me that found you."

"Why do you think we chose a room on the third floor?" Fidelma said through a grin.

Victoire shook her head. "You know if I catch you out again, I'm docking points."

"Fair enough," Fidelma agreed, and started toward the opposite end of the corridor.

"Au fait," Victoire caught her with a smirk, "did I hear you giggling?"

Fidelma paused in front of a tapestry depicting Atymnius' final tragic stand at the Battle of Karamenderes. She fixed Victoire with a perfectly serious look: "absolutely not."

"Ah," Victoire said, cracking another grin. "Probably just imagining things, then."

Fidelma cocked an eyebrow, but smiled back. "Must be." Then she was gone through an archway into a stairwell that led to a corridor that would take her back to Ravenclaw Tower.

Once Fidelma was gone, Victoire laughed to herself. She gave her roommate far too much latitude, and they both knew it. But she couldn't very well start cracking down on the girl now, considering that she'd been letting her gallivant around the School after-hours since early in their fifth-year. If she caught Fidelma out again, she would almost certainly not dock points.

Victoire headed into the Trophy Room to make sure that Fidelma and Theo hadn't disturbed anything too terribly. She rounded the House Cup, standing on a seven-sided stone base in the center of the room; each granite face was engraved with the winning Houses of every year since the points-system had been instated. She passed one wall bedecked with countless plaques and shields, then looked over the array of Medals of Magical Merit going back two hundred years.

She paused at the massive self-spindling scroll that listed the names of every Head Girl and Boy. The parchment spooled on its own from one rod to the other, back or forth, when asked for a particular year. Whoever viewed it last had left it on the first decade of the new millennium, when kids named Reginald Donne and Milo Newsome had served as Head Boys. Victoire grinned when she saw, at the top of the section of scroll, her Aunt Ginny listed as Head Girl in 1999-2000, having elected to repeat her sixth year and become a supersenior.

That was the school-year that her aunt had brought the Triwizard Cup back to Hogwarts. Victoire continued on to the alcove where the now empty glass case stood. The Cup had stayed at the School for five years before Beauxbatons had reclaimed it. It hadn't returned since. She ran her fingers across the wooden cylinder at the front of the vacant case, then spun it.

The cylinder was no larger around than a hefty rolling pin. Yet the dates it showed rolled farther and farther forward as she turned it, until she reached the most recent competitors at the end of the list. The 2014-2015 Tournament had been held in Marseilles, France, and here the name of each champion was forever burned into the wood: Delphine Dumas, Edward Lupin, and Ingrid Schiffer. It had been a close contest. Ingrid had beaten Ted by the narrowest margin.

Victoire finished her circuit of the room, passing a wall lined with commemoratory banners. She spared one glance into the Armor Gallery, found everything in order, and headed back out into the corridor. She detoured quickly back outside again, crossing the Suspension Bridge under an Umbrella charm to the border of the Training Grounds. The rain hammered harder again, but she could feel that the storm was in its final throes. The Lake might rise by three feet, but the downpour would be over by sunrise. Spotting no one, she headed back inside.

After another cursory circuit of the convoluted third floor hallways, Victoire settled into an alcove that afforded her an unobstructed view of the long curving main corridor. She sat on a stone ledge by a vaulted window, propped Professor Diggory's book of British reptiles against her knees, and read up on the diet of the Vipera berus. Rain splattered its rage against the glass beside her, and Tybalt curled up under her knees. She smiled to herself as she considered how delighted Brendon would be if her Animagus form turned out to be a snake.

Five minutes later she paged forward to the far less fearsome Natrix natrix. "What kind of animal am I supposed to be, Tyb?" she sighed, glancing through the Grass Snake's habitat.

Tybalt glanced up at her, yawned, stretched, and tucked his nose back into his paws.

Victoire alternated between reading and making rounds until almost three o'clock in the morning. Her patrol would end at dawn, when she'd hike back up to her dormitory and sleep until lunch. Until then, Victoire walked the same routes, monitored the same halls, and checked into the same rooms, each time finding the very same nothing quite unbothered. By three-thirty, she fully expected Fidelma and Theo's tryst to be the height of excitement for her night.

Which was why the noise from the main classroom hall caught her off guard. Between the howling of the wind, the snoring of portraits, and the grinding stones of the ever-shifting Grand Staircase, Victoire wasn't even sure what she'd heard. She paused in the middle of the corridor, listening intently to the augmented sounds eddying around her. Then she heard the unmistakable peal of glass shattering, and a heavy thump like a sack of wet laundry hitting the floor.

She turned back to the near end of the hall and started testing doors, moving deliberately from one to the next, side to side across the corridor. Each room was empty until she reached the Defence classroom and found the door locked. Victoire banged on the wood. "Prefect. Open the door." She received no answer. She leaned close, heard nothing, and banged again.

"Whoever's in this classroom needs to open this — "

She heard a gagging retch, very faintly, and decided to forego courtesy. She stepped back, pointed her wand at the door hand, and said "Alohomora." She tried the door again, but found it still tightly secured. Victoire aimed her wand again, tried "Effringo." Something creaked inside the door and she pushed again, but again it refused to budge.

That worried Victoire. Only a particularly powerful Locking Spell would resist an effringo counterspell. Whoever was in this room clearly did not want to be interrupted. Victoire backed another step away, focused her energies, flicked her wand sharply and snapped "Bombardo!"

The door obediently tore itself off its hinges. Jagged fragments of ancient oak collapsed across the classroom. Incredibly, the plank of wood surrounding the lock remained attached to the door frame. Victoire ducked through the swirling dust; her vision adjusted in a moment to the murky dimness. She spotted a dark heap crumpled halfway under a desk close to the door, and shards of thick glass that glittered in a puddle of dark liquid beside the heap.

She crossed to that dark form in two steps, stooped over it, rolled it to find a girl's clammy face. Victoire didn't recognize Victoria Hobbes immediately, but then the girl's eyes fluttered opened. She was breathing, barely, pale and sweating profusely. Her lips were dry and cracked, crusted at the corners. She locked onto Victoire's eyes for a moment, choked out what sounded like "…forced…them…" Then she gagged on her own voice, and lost consciousness.

"No you don't," Victoire said, more for her own benefit, as she hauled Hobbes over onto her back. She flicked her wand to cast a quick reparo charm over the glass fragments; they rapidly reconfigured themselves back into a long-necked wine bottle. She hastily siphoned some of the liquid off the floor, returned it to the bottle, then sniffed at the opening. The pungent smell of bilderberry wine made her eyes water, but she detected another much nastier, somehow coppery stench lurking beneath the alcohol. Victoire spotted the cork under a nearby desk, snapped it, plugged the bottle and tucked the neck of it into her belt to secure it.

Then she turned her wand on the ashen Hobbes, and considered briefly. There was way to tell what the girl had ingested or how long it had been in her system, so Victoire settled for the first incantation that came to mind. She heaved Hobbes onto her side, and said, "Purgeais."

The mess was incredible. Hobbes must have finished off the entire bottle of wine, then used a Replenishing Charm and finished it off again. The girl didn't wake, but she kept on breathing, no matter how faint and irregular. Victoire fought the awful smell for two horrible seconds, then wrestled to get Hobbes' limp into her arms. The girl nearly tumbled over twice, but Victoire at last managed to get one arm under her shoulders and the other under her knees.

Driven by a fresh wave of adrenaline, Victoire carted Hobbes out of the classroom, lurching down the corridor toward the hospital wing. She was silently grateful that the hospital, too, was on the third floor, and she reached the outer vestibule in a matter of minutes. She was panting by then under the girls' weight, and she was nearly out of breath when she burst into the infirmary.

Madam Nethersole was checking on one of the two students already laid up in beds when Victoire stumbled in. The unflappable Healer glanced at the new arrivals without a trace of surprise as she finished with her current patient. Then she strode between the rows of beds as Victoire spent the last of her energy reserves dropping Hobbes onto the nearest cot.

She slumped immediately back against the wall beside the bed as the Healer reached them. Madam Nethersole leaned over Hobbes' face, ignoring the fetid stink of her sickness, and pulled open one eye and then the other. Victoire caught most of her breath in a few gasps, propping her palms against her knees. "Found her in a classroom," she explained, then pulled the bottle loose and handed it over to the Healer. "With this."

Nethersole took the bottle, gave it a perfunctory look, and set it on the table next to the bed. "It's bilderberry wine," Victoire continued as Nethersole opened the top drawer of the table and rummaged through it quickly, "but there's something else in it." The Healer closed the drawer, opened the next one down. "It smelled like copper."

The Healer looked at her then, her face impassive. "Like copper. You're sure?"

Victoire nodded.

Nethersole closed the second drawer and skipped straight to the bottom drawer. There she found an ampoule the size of her little finger filled with a clear liquid. "Hold her mouth open," Nethersole instructed Victoire without looking at her, and Victoire obeyed despite her revulsion. The Healer cracked open the ampoule and emptied the contents down Hobbes' throat. The unconscious girl retched on the potion, but Nethersole promptly held her mouth closed.

Hobbes thrashed for a few seconds, then swallowed the liquid and became passive again. Victoire heard the girl's breathing, still faint and labored, but clear enough even under the rain.

"I cast a Vomiting Hex on her," Victoire confessed. She didn't look away from Hobbes. "I made her throw up."

Nethersole pulled open Hobbes' right eye again, and seemed satisfied.

"Then you probably saved her life."