"I'm not sure about this," Myrtle muttered.

After two hours of the Dancing Skeletons, I was tired and I found myself wanting to head off to my room and rest. But I'd promised Myrtle, which meant that I had to at least make an appearance.

"You were the one who wanted to go," I said. "Do you want to back out?"

Myrtle sniffed. "You just want to go back and spend time with all your living friends."

"That's not true," Hermione said. She'd somehow managed to drag Neville and Mildred along for the ride. "I'm very interested in seeing what ghosts do for a party."

"I've heard," Neville said. "Which is why I brought this."

He held up a can of... something.

"What's that?" Mildred asked.

"Ghosts love to get the smelliest foods they possibly can for their parties... they think if it's strong enough they can almost smell it, and maybe taste it a little," Neville said. "This is Surstromming; it's supposed to be the smelliest food in the world."

"That's... really thoughtful," I said. I hadn't bothered to bring anything. "Did we bring anything, Mildred?"

"Uh... it's Millicent," Mildred said. "And no...I didn't think any of the ghosts could carry any presents."

We were heading for one of the roomier dungeons, and through my bugs I could see that they'd gone all out in decorating it. There were black candles everywhere that were giving off a bluish glow, and there was a raised dais on which ghostly musicians were playing ghostly instruments. It was an eerie, yet somehow beautiful music.

The Dancing Skeletons were there, and ghosts swarmed around them, talking excitedly to them in little clumps around each of the Skeletons. There was a table covered in rotting food; ordinarily my insects would have been thrilled by this, but the cold was making them sluggish. Ghosts were passing through the food, as though they'd be able to regain their lost senses of taste, even if just for a moment.

There was a chandelier above that practically glowed with a thousand candles shining blue. There were hundreds of ghosts, most of whom were dancing a waltz.

I pulled out my wand, and immediately Hermione and the others were on guard.

"It's going to be cold," I said. I cast a warming charm on myself and then on the others. Hermione had mastered the charm, but the others still weren't able to do it. It had already been handy on a couple of colder days in the Dungeons, although Snape didn't like it around certain potions; apparently the ambient temperature sometimes had an effect on the ingredients.

I was learning to exclude parts of my body from the warming charm as a result; it wasn't something that I'd figured out any other use for, but Hermione seemed to think that older students might even be willing to pay for the spell, although she recommended waiting until winter, when the price would be higher.

As we stepped into the Dungeon, I saw Nearly Headless Nick floating up to us. He was scowling at Myrtle.

"She's with me," I said. "My plus one."

He looked at me, and for a moment it looked as though he wanted to argue. Finally, he said, "As long as you keep her from causing trouble like she did last year."

Turning to her, he said, "Keep your moaning to yourself. Nobody likes a Deathday downer."

"It's someone's Deathday?" Neville asked. He seemed to know a great deal about the life and times of ghosts.

"Mine!" Nicholas said proudly. "We're just combining it with the Dancing Skeleton after-party. Such an honor."

There were actually a few living students mixed up with the ghosts. Most of them were Ravenclaws, probably lured here for the same reason Hermione had come. They were mostly ignoring the ghosts and focusing on the Skeletons.

"So does anyone know what's up with the Skeletons?" I asked as Nicholas turned to leave. "Are they like ghosts, or are they enchanted artifacts, or what? They're great musicians, and if magic can do that... I'm really impressed."

"I heard that it was due to a magical accident," Hermione said. "Killed an entire dance troupe, but not all the way. They decided to make the best of it, and they've been more successful since they died than they ever were when they were alive."

"Ghosts envy them," Myrtle said, staring at the closest skeleton. "They get to actually touch things, and some people even say they can still smell things, even though they don't have noses."

"That's an unsubstantiated rumor," a nearby ghost said. "And they aren't talking."

The Skeletons could talk, which made sense. If they could blow a trumpet, they could do most of the work involved in talking.

Neville held up his can. "Where do I put this?"

I pointed at the table. He walked over to the table, found an empty plate and he opened the can.

Those students closest to him started to gag and back away, although the ghosts began to gather round. Neville looked a little green at the gills.

My bugs were suddenly all wide awake and excited.

Considering that I could start to smell it from where I was at, I decided to stay on this side of the room for a while. I could hear Hermione gagging along with most of the others, and I purposefully kept my face neutral. Pushing my response into my bugs wasn't that hard.

"You should dance," I said to Myrtle.

"What?" she asked. "Nobody would..."

"There's more male ghosts here than female," I said. "Which means that your chances are pretty good."

Here I was acting like an expert on dances. I'd never actually been to one. Before Emma I'd been too young. After my bullying I'd become a recluse. Once I'd become Skitter...well, there hadn't been time to dance, and that was even more true once I'd become Weaver.

Letting go on the dance floor had been strangely cathartic, and I could understand how people might enjoy it.

Approaching the nearest skeleton that wasn't surrounded by people, I said, "You guys are great!"

His head turned toward me; there was a dim glow deep in the back of his eye sockets, but his body language didn't seem hostile, at least insomuch of a body as he had.

"Thank you," he said. His voice was strangely deep. "I am Billy Bones."

"Bones...isn't that a little on the nose?" I asked.

"It is a stage name," he said. "We have chosen to leave our old identities behind, and to reinvent ourselves. It is something you are familiar with, yes?"

I froze, a chill going down my spine.

"What do you mean?"

"You are the mystery American," he said. "The one no one knows anything about. Troll slayer and the Demon Witch of Hogwarts."

"People are calling me that?"

"Even we've heard of you," he said. "And we're famous."

I scowled.

While it made sense that the parents of the students would have gotten letters about me, it didn't make sense that I was that well known. Of course, Wizarding Britain was the equivalent of a small town, and people in small towns liked to gossip, but it was inconvenient nonetheless.

I already had at least one Death Eater after me. I suspected that it was Avery; the boy I'd dunked in the boil potion had been his nephew and there was likely some resentment there. For all I knew the younger Avery was already a Death Eater.

He leaned forward. "There's something in your eyes, though...I cannot tell what it is."

I'd seen ghosts staring at me often enough that it had made me a little paranoid. I quickly dropped my eyes. I doubted that a skeleton was a legilimens, but it wasn't impossible. After all, he'd once been a Wizard. He didn't seem to be carrying a wand, but wandless magic was possible.

"We are envied and pitied at once, creatures of two worlds," Billie Bones said. "Better than ghosts, but not really quite human. I'm sure you have felt the same, as a muggleborn in the house of the snakes."

"I'm not envied," I said. "Feared sometimes, but envied?"

"People envy power. They may not say that they do, but it is true. The Slytherins respect and envy power even more than the other houses do. I suspect that you have found them easier to deal with of late, yes?"

I nodded slowly.

"You were Slytherin?" I asked.

"Muggleborn, once," he said, but he nodded. "It wasn't always the house it is now. There was a time when a muggleborn could join, and while there was always some stress, you could make your way as long as you proved yourself. That's not how it is now, I hear... except for you."

"I was afraid I was going to have to make some new ghosts before they left me alone," I admitted. "Which would make my next six years at school a trifle awkward."

I didn't have anything in my arsenal to deal with ghosts, and from what I had seen, they tended to carry grudges for a very long time.

Was that a problem Voldemort had? Did the ghosts of his victims haunt him, or did Wizards have something like the ghost traps in Ghostbusters to get rid of annoying spirits from the astral plane?

"You won't have an easy time of it," he said. "Not with what's coming. War is on the horizon and everybody knows it. This is our last gig in Britain; we will be taking an extended world tour until this is all over."

"It's that bad?"

"You-know-who's people have even less liking for nonhumans than they do the muggleborn. They're perfectly willing to use those who seem useful, but the rest? If he wins, things are likely to become uncomfortable."

"Why doesn't anyone do anything then?" I asked. "Voldemort may be the second most powerful Wizard in Britain, but his people aren't."

"Who is better at fighting? A law abiding citizen, or a criminal? I'm sure you've seen that in the muggle world as well."

I nodded.

"The Death Eaters fight often and they fight well, and most Wizards simply wish to be allowed to live their lives in peace. They depend on the aurors to protect than, and there are not enough aurors to do what must be done."

I frowned.

It was the guerrilla warfare problem.

A society tended to be be large and to have fixed locations, places where the enemy could attack with every confidence that their target would be there.

Guerrilla soldiers tended to vanish into the mist, to attack and then disappear. It was worse if they received support from the local population, which was almost always the case in muggle conflicts.

Voldemort's people didn't need that kind of support. If they were smart, Wizards could supply almost everything they needed themselves, and what they couldn't supply, such as food, they could get from the muggles.

In a way they were like Cape villains. They did their crimes while disguised and then they melted into the general population.

The best way to address guerrilla warfare was to keep the populace happy so that it never arose in the first place. That ship had already sailed.

The purebloods felt threatened by the muggleborns, in part because they were trying to change things. They threatened the power of the old order, and people always became anxious and tended to lash out when they thought that their position in society had become precarious.

I couldn't see a solution to it, other than to simply burn the whole thing down and start again, and I wasn't exactly in a position to do that.

"It was nice speaking to you," Billy Bones said, "But I have promised a young lady a dance."

An older Ravenclaw approached, looking at me uncertainly before Billy took her hands and they joined the dancers out on the dance floor.

They weren't the only ones; I saw Mildred...er Millicent dancing with one of the skeletons. They made a weird looking pair.

Myrtle was dancing with an older ghost wearing what looked like medieval armor. I hadn't seen an expression of happiness on her face before, and she actually looked almost pretty.

Hermione sidled up to me.

"There are ghosts here that are over a thousand years old!" Hermione said. "I've spoken to some of them! They've got some amazing stories to tell, although none of them want to talk about how they died."

"Would you?" I asked, looking at her. "It's probably best not to ask. It's like asking someone about being bullied, except even worse."

She stared at me for a moment, and then nodded.

"This is what I thought coming to Hogwarts was going to be like," she said, looking around. "Not..."

"Bullying and death threats?" I shook my head. "People are the same all over, whether they are Wizards, Witches or Muggles. They're petty and they fight among themselves. Give them a little power and its even worse."

She glanced at me. "You're really cynical to be eleven."

"Says the twelve year old," I said. "It must be nice to have all that extra, worldly experience."

Scowling, she shoved me a little. "Not everybody had to carry a knife to school."

I shrugged. "Must have been nice to go to a school where there wasn't a constant threat of being stabbed."

We were both quiet after that.

I didn't dance with anyone that evening; the ghosts were a little too spectral for my tastes, and the Skeletons were monopolized by the older students. I'd never really waltzed anyway.

Still, we stayed a couple of hours, and eventually the evening ended to everyone's satisfaction. I was exhausted by that point, a situation that seemed to happen more and more these days. Maybe it was the mental strain I was suffering from always having to be on my guard.

Mildred went straight to bed, but I felt sweaty and so I prepared for my bath. As I slipped into the warm water, I closed my eyes.

The Death Eaters were going to attack me over the summer; at the very least they'd be waiting at the Train Station. I was going to have to come up with a plan to deal with that. Most likely, I'd have to coordinate the plan with whoever Dumbledore chose to be my guardian.

What bothered me was that I could probably slip away before they caught me, but the train station would be the perfect place to stage an attack on the muggleborn. They would never have a better opportunity to get that many muggleborn in that small of a space at once.

The train station had aurors, but if they had people in the Ministry, they could use the Imperius spell on the aurors before they ever left for work.

If I was running Voldemort's organization, and I hated the muggleborn, that's what I would do. It would make the perfect starting place to set off the war, and it would make the Ministry's job of maintaining secrecy incredibly difficult.

The Ministry would probably arrange for it to be seen as a terrorist attack, but that would involve muggle investigators and would be harder to cover up.

Would the Ministry be able to continue maintaining secrecy in the future? Cell phones were already ubiquitous by my time, and they had kept getting better. How long was it before some muggle snapped a picture that the Ministry didn't catch before it hit the Internet.

Would they even be able to manage the Internet? That would require people with tech savvy, which was the opposite of the Wizarding community.

Were it me, I'd have arranged for muggleborn to have a conventional education on top of their magical one. I'd have them go to college, enter the military and tech sectors, and then I'd have people in every aspect of muggle life.

Ex-military muggleborn along with muggleborn in the police forces would be able to teach the aurors to be better at what they did, and that would make the Wizarding world safer, assuming that I was a benevolent Minister for magic.

I frowned.

My bugs weren't seeing anything or hearing anything, but there was a strange smell. They couldn't identify it, though.

I listened with my own ears and I heard nothing.

It didn't smell like poison being pumped through the vents, and none of my bugs were dying or even sedated. It was a chemical smell, though; it smelled almost like alcohol.

The door to the bathroom opened, and there wasn't anyone on the other side.

I lunged for my wand.

My bugs saw ripples in the water on the floor; it looked like footsteps even though I couldn't hear a thing.

Firing off a cutting spell, I saw red suddenly staining the floor. I lashed out again, but I suddenly felt hands around my throat, and I was struggling to breathe.

A massive force shoved me under the water, and the wand dropped out of my hand. I grabbed for the unseen, invisible hands, trying to bend the thumb and fingers back. It was useless; I didn't have the strength in my hands, and whoever it was was very strong.

Almost without my conscious volition, bugs began to swarm from the vents. They were coming from everywhere, and there were bugs that I didn't even realize that I'd had control of.

I kept struggling even as I felt the bugs stinging the person who was strangling me to death. They kept biting and stinging and for a moment I felt a measure of hope.

My lungs burned like hot lava and I clawed and punched. My feet scrabbled for purchase against the bottom of the tub, but they kept slipping.

Everything turned dark.