This chapter is a bit short, but it's been about forever since I last updated, so I thought I should post something. I think it works as a short chapter, but it does have a cliff-hanger, so I'll try to get another one up before too long.

Fjeijei had looked into too many wrong dormitories. In each one of them girls slept in rows of beds. She'd been worried at first that she'd wake some of them up, either by moving too loudly or by pulling back bed-hangings too swiftly, and have to deal with putting them back to sleep in a non-suspicious manner. It was however, an unwarranted concern. Snores and the assorted muffled noises of sleepers had drowned out any sound she made, and her cautious movements were lost in the tossing, and turning, and twisting of bed-sheets.

She was getting fed up. It wasn't that the search was particularly strenuous, just that it had been going on for a long time, and she was tired.

She opened the door to the next dormitory with more force than was necessary. It bounced off the wall, but the sound didn't seem to deter any of the sleepers.

She checked in one bed, then another. Neither contained the girl she was looking for.

She faced some resistance when she tried pulling back the curtains of the third bed, but got them open without much difficulty. The bed inside was empty. Which is not to say that it was unoccupied, but that the area inside the canopy looked like a void. No light nor sound emerged from it.

Fjeijei smiled to herself. Even if this wasn't her mark, it was something interesting.

She noiselessly dropped the book bag she'd taken from Ginny beside the bed, then thrust a hand into the darkness, and felt it sink into a mass of curly strands. She closed her hand around them, but instead of pulling them out, she leaned closer in.

"-o you think you're doing?" a panicked voice met her ears as she thrust her head into the darkness.

From the inside, the darkness wasn't dark. It wasn't bright, but enough light to illuminate a few lines of writing emanated from the tip of a wand.

Fjeijei looked at the girl in front of her; it was like looking into a terrified mirror. She smiled.

"Finally, I've been looking for you forever."

"Get off of me!"

"No," said Fjeijei, "I need to talk to you."

She loosened her grip on the girl's hair so that she wasn't in constant pain, but didn't let go enough for her to get away either.

"You've probably noticed that weird things have been happening," Fjeijei sat on the bed, crossing her legs, "From what I understand, you've been trying to stop those things."

Hermione didn't respond. She kept her eyes on her doppelganger's face as she inched her hand toward her wand.

"Polyjuice potion?" she asked as Fjeijei's hands pulled at her hair.

"No, nothing so crude." Fjeijei laughed, "You know, your hair looks a lot better pulled straight."

"Why are you do– What are you doing?"

"I'm talking to you. I want you to tell me what happened that made the last one who was here, Marietta I think you knew her as, leave."

Marietta's words came back to Hermione: they'll punish you a thousand times more. The tips of her fingers touched her wand.

"There was a spell, a trueseeing charm. It was simple; everyone could do it. We had to cast it on each other in class. When I cast it on Marietta she... broke apart. She became someone else, then she ran."

"Hmm," Fjeijei pulled at Hermione's hair, not out of malice, but because she couldn't be bothered to support her own hand, "It doesn't make sense that the illusions of the sorority would be broken so easily. She had all of the items. Something else must have gone wrong; that can't be all that happened."

"That's all that I know about."

Fjeijei gazed at Hermione, taking in the cut above her brow. She brought her free hand up to trace the raised skin, "When did this happen?"

"Today," Hermione didn't know where the compulsion to lie came from, but she gave in to it, "I fell by the lake and hit a rock."

Fjeijei glared at Hermione as the skin above the doppelganger's left eyebrow split open, then meshed back together again. The scratch that mirrored Hermione's faded until it was barely visible.

"I've already made an excuse for that," Fjeijei told Hermione and her look of horror.

"Now, I can't honestly say I'm sorry, because you've caused us a lot of trouble, and quite frankly I find this fun, but I'm going to have to make sure you're out of the way."

Seeing Hermione's eyes widen, Fjeijei leaned in closer to the girl.

"I'm not going to kill you," she whispered, "You're just going to go to sleep; maybe I'll even let you dream."

Fjeijei brought her hands up to the base of Hermione's skull.

"You can scream if you want. I'm not gagging you, and it's obvious no-one can hear."

Fjeijei gave her a twisted smile as Hermione filled her lungs. She didn't see the wand gripped tightly in her hand.