Thanks for another great review, mywildcharms – love all your great input and observations! You may be waiting a while for Evie to lose her air, haha. As for Scorpius, besides an extremely brief cameo here, he'll be showing up several chapters later – Lily's taking solo spotlight for what's just ahead at the end of this chapter as we dive into more intrigue-laden content and classes takes a backseat. Quidditch, however…funny enough, good timing with that comment, right as this chapter unfolds…
As a side note, I felt like I was writing a FIFA fanfic for half this chapter, not a Harry Potter one. A weakness of mine is going onnnnnnn about the details in a match of Quidditch…kind of hard not to when you're not writing about the Seekers.
Halloween came and went and still Lily's nightmares continued. They changed in little subtle ways, sometimes with no faces amidst the crowd of shades hurrying in and out of the Ravenclaw dormitory, sometimes with more shadows watching her, sometimes ending with her rooted to the ground, and sometimes allowing her to move freely about. Some nights they never came at all, and she slept peacefully until morning. Some nights they stuck around so long and so forcefully that by the time she awoke she felt as if she'd never slept at all.
Typically, that happened at the worst possible times.
"You're tired now?" Wayne bemoaned to her at the Ravenclaw table in the Great Hall on one particularly cold Saturday morning in mid-November. "Like, did you forget that this one Quidditch team called Hufflepuff is playing this other team called Ravenclaw in an hour and a half?"
Lily clawed sleep out of her eyes, feeling beyond drowsy. "I know. I just couldn't get to sleep."
"Can you at least be a human missile on the pitch today if you can't catch the Quaffle? That way Vale and I don't have to do all the Chaser work."
"I can play, Wayne, lay off," she grumbled, stirring eggs around her plate until they devolved into a yellow bog. "Just leave me alone until we have to go down."
Wayne sighed and glanced over down the table, where Vale Leng and Jamie Beaufort were deep in conversation about last-minute tactics for the match. The Ravenclaws had stepped up training to four or five times a week over the past two weeks after Gryffindor had exacted bloody vengeance on Slytherin for two straight losses, crushing their rivals to the tune of four hundred-ten to one hundred. Roxanne had even topped Slytherin's prodigy Seeker Marcellus Southwick for the first time – and with Gryffindor's dominance out for everyone to see, Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff knew the stakes. Whoever wanted to challenge for the Cup this year couldn't afford to slip up – or even scrape out meager wins.
Lily had only further realized the gulf between Gryffindor and everyone else when Rose came up to her in the hallway in the past week, urging her on in her first match but doing so in a tone that suggested, and maybe your house will even do well enough to score a single goal against us when we go head-to-head in the spring!
That match will not be fun.
She couldn't worry about Gryffindor now, though. Not after Chloe Meredith's continued struggles at Seeker in practice that only put more weight on the shoulders of the Ravenclaw Chasers to score, and definitely not after the past week in Charms had felt like a miniature cold war as the Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws glared daggers across the room at each other.
"Oh, lord, they all look so superior," Natalie growled at the table as she eyed the Hufflepuffs. "What is it with Hufflepuffs that they act like they're so holy because their house is about friendship and flowers and crap, and that this means the minute you say anything bad about them, you're automatically the devil?"
"Uh, 'friendship and flowers?'" Logan snickered. "I think you invented a fifth house, Nat."
She snorted. "No, seriously. I mean, it sounds better when you attribute those things to them. It makes them obnoxiously wholesome and easy to hate."
"Well, that's pretty loony, but at least you have that whole rah-rah spirit thing down," Wayne grunted into his half-eaten breakfast. "Screw it, I'm not hungry anymore either."
"Eat, you two," growled Vale from down the table, taking a break from her strategy talk. "If you get hungry mid-match and play like crap, I'm not gonna be happy. Are you two their friends? Get them to eat."
Natalie looked offended. "I'm not force-feeding people, that's gross."
"I'm a prefect. I'll give the house five points to see that," Jamie interjected. For being the only other veteran on the Ravenclaw team, he looked anything but concerned about the match – or much at all, a far cry from Vale's eagle-look expression.
"Really?" cried Nat. She immediately began scooping huge helpings of whatever she could reach onto Wayne and Lily's plates, adding, "You two need to get lots of fiber and protein and whatever those little black bits in the mash are, because that does muscle growth and whatever!"
When she looked expectantly towards Jamie, he laughed and said, "I lied, I can't give points for that. If I could, I'd just give the whole house two thou because I remembered to zip up after leaving the loo. I just thought that was funny."
A few minutes after Vale and Jamie left for the pitch, Wayne pulled Lily up and said, "C'mon, we're not gonna score just staring at breakfast plates all morning."
"I still need to throw up," Lily murmured.
"Well, great, let's do that outside and not in front of hundreds of people."
Logan clapped Wayne on the back and gripped Lily's shoulder. "You guys got it. It's not gonna be close."
"Yeah, if we get crushed," Lily groused.
"Lily, it's your first match, you're so mopey. Cheer up," Natalie said, getting up and grabbing her in a hug. "Go blow some people up. You too, Wayne." She stood on her tiptoes and gave him a peck on the neck before hurrying back to her seat and looking away.
Wayne gave her a long, perplexed look, only breaking out of his stupor as they left the Great Hall and stepped out onto the grounds.
"So, you're a girl," he said, rubbing his neck.
Lily only half heard him. "Last time I checked."
"What's that mean, then? What Nat…whatever she just did?"
"I dunno. I should've eaten more breakfast. I'm gonna get hungry and play like dirt."
He rolled his eyes. "Really? You shook off what people were saying behind your back all week, and now you freak out over Vale's off-hand snark?"
"People were saying things behind my back?"
Wayne paused with his mouth ajar. "Are you tired and amnesiac? That prick of a Keeper the Hufflepuffs have talked shite about both of us five feet away on Thursday, and you ignored him just fine."
Ugh, whatever. Everything felt awful. Her stomach, her nerves, her head in its fuzzy exhaustion, the chilly, just-above-freezing wind that bit at her nose and ears, all of it. What on Earth had motivated her to try out for the Quidditch team? Had she subconsciously set her sights on embarrassing herself in front of the entire school? This is such a shite idea.
They ran into little Chloe Meredith just outside the stadium, their Seeker clutching her stomach and in tears. "I think I'm too sick to play, guys," she whined. "I can't do this. I have to vomit."
"Oh come on, can you two at least puke on each other and give me warning so I can escape the crossfire?" Wayne lamented.
They were the last ones into the changing room. Lily and Chloe weren't alone with their nerves – out of all the newcomers to the team, only Wayne maintained his composure, although Lily suspected he was laying on the attitude harsher than normal to cover up his own pre-game anxiety. Their Keeper, Royce Marlowe, keeled over on a bench with his uniform splayed out beside him, his face hidden in his hands. Jamie's fellow Beater Maisie Davies, meanwhile, rocked against a wall, her eyes shut tight as she murmured under her breath.
Lily sat down against one of the changing room's oaken alcoves, clenching her hands and trying to keep herself from hyperventilating. Breathe in. Breathe out. Slowly. Your heart's going too fast. Slow it down. It's beating too hard now. You're going to have a stroke.
Vale appraised them with a less-than-satisfied look. "Get dressed, you guys," she said. "Think about getting your pants on rather than remembering how to hold a ball. You're gonna have a seizure if you overthink it right now."
"We could shock the Hufflepuffs into submission with a mass suicide," Jamie suggested.
Vale was not amused.
Lily pulled her uniform out of her alcove and held it up to examine it. A bright, black-outlined, bronze number seven glowed in the middle of a white circle centered on a royal blue tunic. On the back of her riding cape, shining white letters read out POTTER above her number. So it's real. Now it's really real. This has my name on it.
"This is pretty cool, huh?" Wayne said to her, holding out his own cape with TORRES emblazoned over the number four. "It's like I own this." Despite his confidence, his words had a shakiness to him, and his voice had jumped half an octave.
Lily was too nervous herself to answer. By the time Vale stood in front of them in the dusky changing room to go over things for the last time, Lily feared it didn't matter what she had or hadn't eaten for breakfast – last night's supper could come up as well.
Vale took a deep breath, licked her lips, and said, "Alright, this isn't about overthinking or trying to outsmart what we've done well in practice. Just feel your way around the pitch. You've all done good up to now; now we're just going up against these Hufflepuff schmucks. You don't have to be perfect. Just do what you know you can and what we've hammered down in practice. We all do that, we'll win. We don't have to be showy. We're not going to win the Cup today. We have two more games, this is just step one. Let's go make it happen."
"Please, for the love of God, because that Hufflepuff Keeper is a colossal twat," Jamie added.
Lily had a brief visage of Al in Diagon Alley calling a fair-haired boy in a white robe an "absolute clown," but before she could dwell on the memory, Vale and Jamie led them out onto the pitch.
The stadium was packed, split evenly between yellow- and blue-clad spectators. Several chants swirled into one raging din in Lily's ears. She shut her eyes and trooped behind Wayne to shut it all out, but one cry got through to her.
"Come on, Lily! Let's go!"
Lily gritted her teeth and turned her head. There on the front row at midfield was Rose, dressed in blue from head to toe, perching her elbows on the stadium railing like a tiger waiting to pounce. Al sat on her other side, and Lily could make out her brother saying something to her cousin – probably telling her to calm down, knowing him – while Hugo sat on her other side. Bafflingly, next to Hugo – and even more shockingly to Lily, dressed in blue like her family – sat Scorpius Malfoy. How did Hugo convince Rose and him not to kill each other?
"Don't let me look up," she said through her clenched jaw to Wayne.
"Really? Wish I had fans," he said. "Sometimes it's kind of a bummer when your whole family's Muggles 'cept for you."
Vale walked out to midfield as Hogwarts's Quidditch referee and flying instructor, a tall, brown-haired, middle-aged wizard in slate gray robes named Terence Higgs, ushered forward Hufflepuff's captain. It was their Keeper, the same boy Al had scoffed at in Diagon Alley, Tanner Wynch, with starry good looks compromised by a smirk that reeked of self-importance. As he shook Vale's hand, Lily could just make out their exchange.
"Great day for a beatdown," said Wynch, checking out the flat gray sky above. "No wind, no rain, terribly sorry you guys blow this year."
Vale offered him a plastic smile. "Just make sure you stay on your broom. Shame if you got hurt, but I hear it's hard to ride when you have a plug in your butt."
"Are we starting off on penalty shots?" Master Higgs threatened, his whistle already in hand. "No? Then get back to your teams and get on your brooms."
Lily hiked one leg over her Mach 6, sweat pricking her forehead. Up in the stadium commenting booth, she heard Finley Elkwood in the midst of announcing the team rosters: "That's almost a whole new lineup for Ravenclaw. With five new players, we don't have an idea of how good they can be – or not, if that's the case. This game will be a good barometer, in any case, before both squads head into the meet of their schedule against Slytherin and Gryffindor later on."
"Blast that smug prick playing Seeker for me," Vale snarled to Jamie and Maisie. "Little idiot keeps smiling all doe-eyed at me like he's a puppy. Except like one of those puppies that actually has plague, and as soon as you pet it, you get infected."
"That's rather horrifying, Vale, but alright."
Kicking up into the air, Lily felt her stomach's churn easing. The cold air snapped her out of her sleepiness, and the bitter rush of wind rushing down her throat settled down her nerves. She patted her broom once for good luck as Chloe rose next to her, their Seeker still looking petrified as Master Higgs went to release the Snitch.
Swallowing her last jumpy nerves, Lily leaned over on her broom and said, "You okay?" Chloe shook her head, her lips sealed. "You're gonna be fine. You've gotten the Snitch in practice. It's just like Vale said. We did it all already. You beat everyone else to get here already, so you're the best Seeker in our house. And since we're the best house, well…do the math. That smiling kid in yellow over there can't touch you."
Chloe looked at her like she was crazy, gulped as Master Higgs let the Snitch go, and took off high into the air. Really wish I meant all that, thought Lily. Wish I was good at speeches, too.
A moment later the Quaffle was free.
"There they go!" shouted Finley. "Reynauld picking off the Quaffle for Hufflepuff and heading up the left side, Tress and Glover on his flanks."
Lily tuned him out. As soon as Vale missed the tip she fell back on defense, burning back towards Royce and the goals as the three Hufflepuff Chasers hurried down the pitch in a delta formation. Maisie's Bludger scattered them in all directions a second later, and as Reynauld moved into scoring position along the lowest goal, Lily hurried to cut him off. He reared back to throw and launched the Quaffle forward, but Lily stuck out her hand just enough to get her fingertips on it, sending it off-course and into an easy save from Royce.
"Solid defense form new Ravenclaw Chaser Lily Potter!" Finley called. "Early penetration for Hufflepuff goes nowhere, and it's Ravenclaw back on O, Leng taking the Quaffle from Marlowe, passing to Torres – "
Wayne didn't spend any time waiting around. As soon as he picked up the ball he zoomed downfield, blowing past two Hufflepuff Chasers and juking out the third right before a Bludger cut off his progress. He dropped the ball down to Lily, who saw a clear line of attack towards the lowest two goals. She rushed at the right one, drawing Tanner Wynch down to meet her with a sly grin plastered all over his face.
She wasn't going for the right goal, however. Just as she closed in, she pulled left at the last second, and –
"Ah!"
Lily dived as a Bludger came out of nowhere, missing her face by inches. A hand swatted the Quaffle away and she swore as Reynauld for Hufflepuff took off away from her, the ball tucked under his arm. Dammit. Already screwing up.
Master Higgs blew his whistle as Wayne threw an arm at Reynauld as he dove past, missing the Quaffle entirely but clipping him across the chin and nearly decapitating the Hufflepuff Chaser.
"Foul on Torres, and a penalty shot for Hufflepuff. Nasty blow, right on the neck – that's where Quidditch lacks in safety equipment, more progressive critics of the sport would say. Helmets and padding would at the very least go a long way," Finley chimed in. "Ravenclaw's captain isn't too happy, either."
"That's a play on the ball, mate!" Wayne snapped at Higgs as Vale pulled him away.
"Don't argue, you idiot!" she growled in his face. "And this isn't boxing. Lily, don't be afraid of the Bludger. You have to keep your eyes on more than one thing at once."
She nodded and licked her lips as Reynauld head-faked Royce and finally scored the match's first goal, eliciting a groan from the blue-clad half of the crowd.
"Defensive struggle so far in this one, and both teams' Beater play has been better than advertised," Finley called out as Vale took the Quaffle upfield after the score. "Ravenclaw's new Beater Maisie Davies has been phenomenal in the early going – of course she's from a good stock and all, her father Roger Davies being Ravenclaw's captain here during the nineties. That's Leng to Torres, back to Leng, evading Quarlson's off-target Bludger and sending it up high to Potter, action curling high around the right curve –"
Lily dodged past one of the Hufflepuff defenders and shot horizontally across the field to lose her tail. Her broom wasn't the fastest on the pitch, but it had maneuverability and agility to spare – enough to keep the Hufflepuff defense honest. She curled in underneath a Chaser's reach, slid by an errant Bludger that flew way overhead, and made a beeline towards the goals. Wynch pivoted high to intercept her again, and his height made her visibility difficult. She tried to spot a way around him to the goal, but at the last minute as he converged, she spotted another blue-clad player tailing the play far to her right.
She hugged her broom, clutched the Quaffle with two hands, threw an empty hand left to pull Wynch's attention, and instead fired a pass to her right.
"And Ravenclaw scores!" Finley shouted as Lily rolled past Wynch. "Beautiful no-look pass from Potter to Torres, who rifles in a shot behind Wynch for the goal on the center hoop! Just like that, all tied up again here as Hufflepuff regroups."
"Fuckin' A, guys!" Vale shouted, shaking Lily's shoulder as she shot past. "Great pass and great shot!"
Wayne clapped her hand as they pivoted back on defense, all the wariness gone from his face, replaced by a hunger that Lily felt creeping up in her own guts. Adrenaline rushed her through her veins now, all anxieties and nerves long gone, thrown out by the rush of the action and the throbbing crowd all around.
The Chaser battle devolved into a defensive scrum as the Beaters unloaded and the Keepers intercepted a number of shots. The lead changed over and over, and by the time Lily finally maneuvered around Wynch and lined up a shot on her own, the score –
"And Ravenclaw scores again!" Finley shouted. "Fifty all now after Potter scores her first goal as a member of Ravenclaw's team. Beautiful dive from below and around Wynch's outstretched arms as Beaufort's Bludger scattered her pursuers – and that's why the game's played in three dimensions, folks."
"Yes!" Lily screamed, heading back towards her side of the field and pumping her fist. "Yes!"
Wayne clapped her hand. "That's the shite, mate!"
In her excitement, Lily let her eyes trail down to the sidelines. Instantly she wished she hadn't out of embarrassment for her cousin, as Rose was in the midst of a happy dance that "awkward" only politely described.
"Hey, you said no looking down there, yeah?" Wayne teased.
"I don't give. Shut up," Lily said with a bright smile.
The game got nasty in a hurry. A Bludger unseated Lily not two minutes after she'd scored, forcing her to dangle from her broom for a few seconds and watch helplessly as Hufflepuff roared past Royce for a score. Maisie retaliated not thirty seconds later by smacking a Bludger at point-blank range into Hufflepuff Beater Quarlson's head, forcing a play stoppage for several minutes as he regained his senses. As Ravenclaw turned the lead over again with two quick goals, Lily forced another play stoppage as she bum-rushed Hufflepuff's delta of Chasers as they pushed up the field, causing two of them to collide and knocking the Quaffle into the stands near where Professor Vos and Professor Yaro watched.
"That's not legal, come on!" Tanner Wynch snarled, coming out to his goal as the two teams argued. "Potter can't just bull-rush a Chaser who isn't carrying the damn Quaffle! That's not a play on the ball!"
"Don't you start, you didn't even have a good look at it!" Vale snapped at him, putting herself between him and Lily. "Quaffle was way inside the legal area for a hit. Get out of here."
Higgs nodded and shrugged to Wynch. "It was clean. Tight formation like that, that kind of hit's legal."
"That is not! Not at all!"
"Stop arguing and go back to your goal, Wynch, or I'm giving you an Unsportsmanlike Conduct and giving them a penalty shot."
Vale pulled Lily away from the shouting match. "Screw that kid," she grumbled. "If I wasn't poor as hell, I'd pay somebody to make him make a save with his face."
Lily looked over to the staff table as they reset. Yaro looked beyond drunk, stumbling and leaning against a table, dressed in a neutral shade of brown and laughing uproariously at something she could only guess. Was my move that funny? If so…well, awesome. Vos, on the other hand, wasn't hiding his allegiance: He wore a navy blue cloak and gave Lily a subtle thumbs-up as the action kicked up again.
Finley kept the commentary going at breakneck speed as the brutal match opened up. "Ravenclaw pushes their lead to thirty after that last goal by Torres, making it ninety-sixty over Hufflepuff. Largest lead of the game for either squad in a long match that's seen a decisive lack of scoring and some hard-nosed play all around, and look up there, folks – both Seekers diving towards the far side of the pitch, heading not far from the Hufflepuff goals!"
Lily saw. Chloe was way behind her competition, struggling to catch up as both had seen something.
Vale saw the danger immediately. "Come on!" she shouted, corralling the Quaffle, blowing past a defender, and heading upfield with Lily and Wayne in tow. A Hufflepuff Bludger picked off Wayne at midfield, eliciting a loud string of swears behind her as Lily urged her broom to move on. There – something gold shot about just above the grass. Chloe was never going to make it in time, Hufflepuff was going to win.
"Go! Down!" Vale ordered her, soaring up.
Lily figured it out. As Vale clutched the Quaffle and circled away from two converging defenders, Lily shot towards the midway point between Hufflepuff's Seeker and the Snitch. She shot towards the boy in yellow, pushing her broom to go faster, faster, as fast as it could to throw up a blockade. She beat him to the spot, and Vale bulleted a pass at her. The Seeker saw at the last minute, pulling up as Lily swerved high to catch the Quaffle and send him off course. Chloe shot under her at the Snitch –
The crowd exploded as Finley cried, "She's got it! Chloe Meredith with the Snitch, pulling out the save for Ravenclaw! A beautiful bit of teamwork there to clear the way for Meredith, and Ravenclaw hammers out a decisive defensive-minded victory, two hundred-forty to sixty, over Hufflepuff! Hufflepuff drops down to third to open the season, Ravenclaw up to second behind Gryffindor, and all eyes are eagerly set on the next rounds of play for the season as Slytherin will have a chance to dig out of its early-season hole against these Ravenclaws next."
Lily almost crashed into the ground. She leapt off her broom and dashed up to hug Chloe, both girls crying tears of joy. Wayne collided with Lily, the two friends laughing and jumping up and down in excitement. When she looked up to the stands, she saw Rose throwing up her hands in excitement and even Scorpius trying to hide a stupid little grin on his face. That guy.
Al nodded at her from the stands and tapped his hand over his heart. Lily could only smile back.
The next week, Lily felt like she could do everything. The Hufflepuffs in Charms shot ugly looks at her and Wayne in class, but it only made her feel higher up on her mountain peak. She didn't care if they were saying bad things behind her back now. We beat you fair and square. I even scored. So ha. Her surging confidence felt like a drug high she didn't want to climb down from, like something in her blood made her capable of doing anything.
Even taking a stupid risk, if the moment was right.
One such incident devolved from a disagreement into a shouting match with Kaya after Charms class, from there leading to Lily swatting Kaya's bag off her shoulder. How was she supposed to know the girl left her ink bottles all around the outside of the bag?
"Lily!" Kaya shrieked as ink flooded all over her textbooks and parchment. "You prat! That's my stuff!"
"Then don't scream at me like a banshee when you don't get what you want!" Lily yelled at her right as Professor Teague stepped out to witness the commotion.
That earned her a Saturday night detention in short order. Lily fumed as Logan pulled her away down an empty corridor and gripped her shoulders. "What are you doing?"
"What am I doing? She get all up in my face about whatever the hell she's on about. 'Cuz she's Evie's bratty little Rottweiler."
"Lily, listen to yourself. You're just ranting now."
"I'm ranting?"
"Yes! You're letting your Quidditch win get to your head. It's cool that we won and you did a great job, but if you get bigheaded, you're no different than Evie and her posse."
Lily folded her arms and stuck her lip out. "You don't sound very happy we won."
"See? A week ago we would've had a normal, calm discussion about it, but now you get mad at me for trying to explain," Logan sighed. "You're the one who's good at keeping their head under pressure. I know Kaya's a git, but you don't sound like you at all. Come back to reality."
She huffed and pulled away from him, but…dammit, irritating guy that Logan could be, he was sort of right. A little bit. How could she explain to him that who she usually was was an anxiety-ridden mess worrying about this thing and that? She liked telling Kaya to go screw herself. She liked exerting herself for once. Vos had told her in her first year to stand up for herself. He could surely agree with this.
Unfortunately for her, he sided with Logan when she went to see him before class on Friday night. "I'm not saying don't be confident, Lily. You always needed a dose of that, because too often you doubted you could do anything and rolled over for other people. That doesn't mean go and pick fights and get detention, though. Stiffen your backbone when you need to, and use your head when that's more appropriate. Sometimes being confident means letting an idiot gas on and prove that they're an idiot. Stooping to their level...you get the idea."
Fine. Sir.
As Saturday rolled around and the high from the match began to wear off, however, Lily felt the same old insecurities creeping back into her mind. You idiot, a little voice mocked her, you didn't even win the Quidditch game. You scored two measly goals. Chloe won it. So that's a free pass to go make a fool out of yourself in front of your classmates? Stupid girl, you don't even have a brain to use.
Logan probably thinks you're unhinged.
Wayne and Nat didn't say anything when you and Kaya had a go. Wayne's probably gonna tell the whole team you're clinically insane. Nat probably wants nothing to do with you.
Maybe you deserve to be alone if you can't handle a minute bit of success.
You WILL be alone because you CAN'T handle your business.
The facts told her otherwise as Vale applauded her and Wayne's efforts at Saturday morning practice, but she couldn't shake the nagging thoughts that shredded her newfound confidence to pieces as soon as they'd gotten their claws in. They'd had a lifetime to build up, after all, and one week of success wasn't going to uproot them.
By the time she left detention late on Saturday night, she felt utterly deflated again. The castle corridors were empty and quiet, shadows long and dancing in wild frenzies as flames flickered in the torches along the wall. Lily's hand hurt from scribbling hundreds of lines, and all she wanted to do was crash and start a new week.
As she stepped out of the Grand Staircase onto the fifth floor landing, however, something blurred in her peripheral vision. Lily spun her head around just in time to see a black, shadowy trail darting through the fourth floor connector.
Oh, not this again.
Lily looked around, hesitant. Nobody else was out and about. I'm probably just seeing things. Go to bed, idiot. She couldn't just leave it be, however. Lily sighed, dropped her book bag in an alcove, pulled out her wand, and trooped down to the fourth floor. She stepped as lightly as she could, her shoes hardly even tapping the stone floor, measuring her breathing so that she didn't exhale too loudly and alert anyone. Anxious, Lily reached the connector, pressed her back to a column, and peeked around it.
The shadow was right in front of her. It hadn't seen or heard her, instead inspecting the dark corridor windows as if admiring the architecture. Something was funny about the way it looked almost human…almost familiar, but Lily couldn't wrap her mind around just who she thought it looked like. Thin and wiry, with those beady little yellow eyes…I'm not seeing things, that's for sure. She dodged behind the column as it looked over its shoulder. Hazarding a glance a minute later, Lily caught the shadow turning about the end of the passage, in no hurry but leaving her playing catch-up.
What am I doing? I should go tell someone. I should get a teacher.
She didn't. She followed, heading down the corridor the shadow had just left. Lily held her wand out in front of her, careful not to make any noise. Just as she got to the end of the hallway, she looked around – straight into a pair of beady yellow eyes.
The shadow howled and reeled back. Lily fell backwards, scrambling and holding her wand aloft as the shadow spun and raised an arm. Like the last time, it opened up its magical ring, that same seductive band of green energy containing a gray void within it, neon strands bending in towards its dark singularity at the center. Lily scrambled to her feet as the shadow charged into the void, and in a burst of irrational confidence, she thrust her wand at it.
Whoosh!
A bright white flash blinded Lily, and she winced and shielded her eyes. When she looked up, she stifled a scream.
The corridor wobbled. The floor bounced up and down like she was a boat in some demonic sea, the walls caving in and stretching out, the ceiling seizing up and opening to reveal a boiling gray sky lit by an unnatural green hue before closing up again, only to open a moment later. Wind rushed down the corridor from nowhere in particular and headed to the same dead space, howling with cries, shrieks, laughter, chatter, groans, and shouts of joy. People – but not people, as they too fazed in and out like ghosts, turning solid before withering away into nothingness – flew all around Lily, through her even, her presence a nonentity.
That smell on the wind…she'd smelled it before, once before. Cabbage, old cabbage…and musky earth, like after a rainstorm when the worms came out…
Lily backed into one of the wavering walls and covered her mouth with her hands. What did I do?!