The room was quiet after Raleigh left.
Lily was left alone with her thoughts. She tried to piece together what might have made the professor react so strongly to the discovery that she had found his poppets. He must have known it was her who had removed them from the fountain, that much was certainly obvious. And yet he hadn't become angry with her or tortured her again as she had feared he might. Instead he'd done the very thing she had wanted- left her alone.
Not that there was much she could do in terms of trying to escape. Her cage was firmly locked and so too the office door beyond that.
Lily watched the sun retreat behind the clouds through the small window as the hours passed. Despite having blacked out and spent most of the night before unconscious, the stress of the last twenty four hours had left her feeling exhausted. As the last ray of sunlight dimmed and the room fell into a lonely darkness, her eyelids began to droop.
But just as they were about to close shut, her mind drowsy with fatigue, Lily saw something white flash past her blurry vision. Startled and suddenly alert, she slid quickly back up into a sitting position and looked around.
Standing to the side of her cage, having just jumped up onto the desk, was a pure white cat.
'Doesn't look like he's coming back' it purred.
'Fides!' Lily barked in surprise. The strangest part about being able to understand her familiar's feline language was that he could understand her too, even when she was in her canine form.
'How on earth did you get in here?' Lily let out a low howl through the bars.
'I never left' Fides replied simply.
'You've been in here this whole time?' Lily asked in disbelief. Suddenly she felt an inexplicable sense of relief wash over her. All this time, she hadn't been alone. Even in her darkest moments, when the pain from Raleigh's cruciatus curse had been ripping through her, he had been there, waiting for his chance to come out.
'I'm sorry I couldn't stop Raleigh from hurting you…' Fides purred softly. Lily could see his tail go bushy and his whiskers twitch in agitation at the memory of it.
'No, you did the right thing' she responded quickly. 'Anyway, I'm just glad to have you to talk to… this could be the last time that I-'
Suddenly Lily felt a sad howl form in her throat. Her father had often told her the story of when Dumbledore had told him that death was 'but the next great adventure'. But Lily didn't feel as brave as her father. All she felt was a clenching, unbearable pain in her chest at the thought of never seeing the people she loved again. Of never laughing about something ridiculous with Teddy. Of never racing James on her broom or staying up late discussing some intriguing new potion with Rose. Of never paying Albus back for all the times he had protected her as a child- from spiders or ghosts (both real and imagined) or particularly fast bludgers. Of never being able to finally protect him from Raleigh. Of never dancing like crazy in her living room with Lysander or arguing about something trivial with Poppy. Of never again feeling Scorpius's arms encircle her or hearing his soothing voice.
If Lily had have been in her human form, she would be bawling. As it was, the only way she had to express her deep despair was through a long lonely howl.
'Shut up you twat' Fides hissed. 'At this rate the Professor will hear you and come back before I can get you out of here'
'You're going to get me out?' Lily immediately stopped howling and turned her snout towards him. 'How?'
'Chelidonium Miniscula' Fides said, stepping to the side to reveal a vial of yellow, honey-like substance.
'Chelido-what now?' Lily asked perplexed.
'It's a potion for quantum tunneling' Fides purred.
Lily blinked at him, feeling equal parts stupid and frustrated.
'It makes solid objects able to be passed through by messing up their atoms' Fides yowled impatiently. 'It's what Raleigh used on that bookcase you walked through yesterday. I found this vial in amongst his potions collection in the cabinet I was hiding in last night'
'oh…' said Lily finally comprehending. 'So we can use it to get out of this room?'
'There's only enough for this cage I'm afraid. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it, but first lets get you out of there'
To Lily's surprise Fides leaned his body up against the cage and began to push it along the desk towards the edge.
'What are you doing?!' she barked in surprise.
'I need to get you in a position where I can drop the vial on you. I don't have opposable thumbs' Fides grunted back.
'Wait- what do y-?' But Lily was unable to finish her sentence as Fides gave the cage one last nudge and the thing fell straight off the desk with her inside it.
'Ouch!' Lily was sent tumbling about inside the cage as it collided with the stone ground.
When she blinked away the tears from her watering eyes she could see Fides sitting on the edge of the desk above her twitching his tail. He had the vial of potion clasped between his teeth.
'Best to get out of the way as best you can' he said before opening his jaw and allowing the glass vial to drop.
'How?!' Lily barked just as the vial fell through the bars and smashed on the ground in front of her. She leapt back to avoid the splash of potion.
Lily had been expecting the potion to react like acid, fizzling away. Instead, it didn't appear to do anything at all except evaporate very quickly.
There was a moment of silence before Fides meowed; 'well, go on. Try to get out'
Lily gingerly took a step forward. She stuck her neck out thrusting her snout into the bars which had been covered in potion. To her surprise, rather than colliding with them, her nose went straight through. So too did her head and then her front paws until all of her had managed to easily pass through to freedom.
Lily transformed back into her teenage girl form and bent towards the desk to gather Fides up in her arms.
'You clever cat! You saved me!' She cried.
'Don't get too excited' Fides responded soberly. 'We still have to find a way to get out of this room'
'Right' Lily agreed, slackening her grip on him and looking around the room. She spotted the small window and a flicker of a plan formed in her mind.
But as desperate as she was to put as much space between herself and Raleigh, she didn't want to have gone through everything she had just to leave without any evidence. She let out a sigh at the sight of the items she had kept in the velvet bag strewn over Raleigh's desk. He had taken the poppets- her one piece of viable evidence against him. To make matters worse, she couldn't find the Mauraders map. Raleigh must have swept it up into the bag along with the wooden effigies.
Lily walked around to the back of the desk and pulled open the bottom drawer. The jars of silvery smoke remained. Now that she knew for certain whose memories were contained within, the sight of them filled her with rage. How dare Raleigh tamper with her brothers memories? It was beyond evil, she thought, to do something which could so fundamentally change a person's ability to be themselves; to take away from them what they had learnt through experience and to replace it with something artificial. If nothing else, Lily hoped that the physical evidence of her brothers memories stuffed inside the jars would be enough to lock him up in Azkaban forever. She picked up as many of the small jars as she could manage and filled her skirt pockets and the front of her blouse with them.
Lily then turned back towards the window.
It was set high up on the sandstone wall, but she was able to reach it by climbing on top of one of the Professor's trunks.
'What are you-?' Fides began to enquire. But before he could finish, there was a great crashing sound as Lily thrust lightening bolt like magic out of her palms into the window pane. Shards of glass rained down onto the floor below.
'You don't think you could have tried opening it first?' Fides purred lazily.
Lily shrugged at him. She was too busy thinking about what to do next to respond. Unfortunately, it was quite obvious that she was too big to fit through the small window as she was.
After a moment of sighing and considering her next move, she placed Fides up onto the window ledge. He stuck his head out the broken window before looking back at her and shaking his head.
'We're about a hundred storeys up. There's no way you can get down from here'
Lily remained silent as she hauled herself up onto the ledge and transformed back into a fox.
'See?' Fides asked. But Lily nevertheless crawled out through the broken window onto the outer ledge. From there she leapt down onto one of the buttresses that connected the outer wall of Raleigh's office to the spiral of a small tower below. With slow, nervous steps she began to walk her way down towards the tower.
'Are you mad?' Fides meowed down to her.
Lily got as far as she crook of where the end of the buttress met the side of the tower. She felt stable enough there to transform back into her human self. Then with her legs wrapped tightly around the buttress below and one hand holding onto the wall in front of her for dear life, she thrust out her palm and cried out into the darkness.
'Accio Feather Supreme!'
Just as Lily had feared, nothing happened. James must have remembered to lock his broom up properly inside his locker in the Quidditch change rooms. That, or it was simply to far for the Accio charm to work.
She let out a sigh and closed her eyes. The sincere, dark eyes of her friend Ebele Akingbade appeared in her mind.
The more emotional energy you can transfer into your magic the stronger it is. Feelings like love and hatred can produce the strongest, most potent magic.
Yes, Ebele had told her that. It felt like decades ago now and yet she could still hear the deep tone of her voice.
Lily let out a sigh and opened her eyes. Her brows furrowed and her face tensed as she remembered back to the events of that morning. She saw the white jet of sparkling light leave the tip of Raleigh's wand and collide with Scorpius's chest. In her mind, she watched him fall to the ground again where he lay unmoving as though dead. She recounted the way Raleigh had petrified her brother and ripped the silvery memory from his temple.
'Accio Feather Supreme!' Lily bellowed again into the night.
She yelled so loudly that her throat tightened in pain. But for a few moments, all she could hear was the sound of herself trying to catch her breath.
Until suddenly, a very faint wizzing noise could be heard on the wind. Lily's face jolted upwards in hope. For a moment she told herself that the sight of a thin wooden object appearing on the horizon was just a mirage. But as it grew larger and larger, so too did Lily's smile. She had done it.
'Don't forget to come get me' Fides meowed from where he still sat on the window sill.
Lily caught James's most prized possession with both hands. She had never been so happy to have a broom in her hands, and that was certainly saying something. After throwing a leg over it, she floated upwards to where Fides was waiting for her. Once he was safely in her lap, Lily looked around to get her bearings. She needed to figure out the fastest way to get to the hospital wing.
She needed to make sure that Scorpius was alright.
But when Lily finally made it to the row of arched windows that lined the outside of the hospital wing and pushed one open, she found the large room empty. With Fides at her heals she ran from one end of the wing to the other opening the curtains of each bed as she searched for in vain for Scorpius. Even Madam Pomfrey was nowhere to be seen, which was considerably odd given the matron tended to man the hospital wing around the clock.
Lily shuffled about where she stood at the centre of the room, panicking at this unexpected development. If Scorpius wasn't here, then where was he? Had Raleigh come to get him after leaving his office with the poppets? Was he in danger?
'What do we do now?' Lily asked Fides, anxiously. Without the map she had no way of knowing where Scorpius, or anyone else for that matter, was within the castle.
'We find the Headmistress and show her those memories' Fides meowed.
Lily nodded, trying to calm her rising nerves. Making sure that Raleigh was outed as soon as possible seemed to be the best plan of action in order to prevent him from attempting to harm any of her friends.
She chucked James's broom onto one of the beds and ran out of the hospital wing towards the great hall. The large clock in the corridor told her the Headmistress and her students would be about half way through their dinner feast. Lily desperately hoped that she would find Scorpius in there with them, having been healed by Professor Montespan. But a small voice at the back of her mind reminded her that he was unlikely to have left the hospital wing to go to dinner despite knowing that she was still locked up in Raleigh's office.
'This isn't right' Fides purred to her as they rushed through the corridors towards the Great Hall. 'It shouldn't be so quiet… where is everyone?'
'They're all at dinner. It's dinner time' Lily reasoned. But she felt it too; the eery sense of foreboding. They hadn't seen or heard another soul since they had broken out of Raleigh's office.
When Lily reached the great marble steps and the entrance hall, she already knew for certain something was wrong. She should have been able to hear the sound of chatter by now, or at least see a flicker of light through the Great Hall doors from the thousands of candles that floated in the starry night sky above the tables.
Instead everything was dark and quiet. She pushed open the heavy Great Hall doors to find the four long house tables empty or both food and students. Not a single candle had been lit.
Lily stood staring into the enormous room as she tried to catch her breath. Panic was flooding through her entire body now. This was not normal- she had never seen Hogwarts this empty before. Even in the dead of night, on the occasions when she had wandered the castle in order to get to the library to see Scorpius, there had always been more movement than there was now- the odd student out of bed or a professor patrolling the halls.
In the absence of any other idea of how to locate the Headmistress, Lily turned around and rushed back up the marble staircase towards the Headmistress's office. She picked Fides up and held him steady on her shoulder so that she could leap up the staircases two steps at a time.
The horrifying thought that perhaps Raleigh had managed to murder Lysander, Poppy or Scorpius, thereby breaking their blood bond, and had gone on to use Noirmorter on the entire population of students and staff slipped into Lily's mind like a dark cloud, causing her hands to shake. She told herself that couldn't be possible; that he simply would not have had enough time to inflict so many people with a curse which required over one hundred different potions ingredients and the light of the full moon in order to be cast.
When she reached the statue of the gargoyle which guarded the entrance to the Headmistress's office, she gave it the password McGonagall had told Lily herself over a year ago.
'Montrose Magpies'
The gargoyle raised an eyebrow at her.
'Oh I know that one's probably old' Lily said immediately. 'But I really need to get into that office to see the Headmistress'
'Students don't require a password tonight due to the emergency circumstances. Headmistress's orders' The gargoyle told her swiftly before swinging open.
But Lily didn't move.
'What do you mean emergency circumstances?' she asked paling.
'The evacuation of all students due to an intruder' the gargoyle told her. It sounded as though he were reciting from an emergency manual.
'What intruder?' Lily demanded, frustrated by the statues lack of urgency.
'Don't know' the gargoyle said flatly. 'The Headmistress can tell you when she returns. Till then, in here is the safest place. I only open for students'
Lily let out a sigh and exchanged a look with Fides, who had jumped off of her shoulder back to the ground and was sitting by her ankles.
'I guess that explains the quiet' Fides purred thoughtfully.
Together they made their way up the small stone staircase that wound up towards the Headmistress's office. Lily could hear the sound of stone scraping against stone as the gargoyle swung shut after them.
Just as the statue had said, the Headmistress was not there.
Fides leapt up onto the velvet couch and began to lick his paws.
'Guess we'll just have to wait for her return. At least it's safer in here I suppose' he purred lazily.
But Lily was not feeling so at ease. She couldn't be sure that Poppy, Lysander and Scorpius had been evacuate safely along with all the other students. Lily paced back and forth trying to understand what was going on.
Had her friends somehow been successful in convincing Professor McGonagall that Raleigh was not safe? Was he the 'intruder' the gargoyle had spoken of, the reason why everyone had been evacuated? But if that were the case, why had no one come to get Lily out of his office? Surely Lysander and Poppy, if not Scorpius, would have told them she was missing?
She didn't want to sit around doing nothing whilst she waited for the Headmistress to return. It was then that Lily spied the shallow stone basin that stood on a pedestal at the far end of the room. Fides's ears stood up as she strode over to it.
'What are you doing?' He asked sharply.
'We can at least figure out which of theses memories can be used to prove once at for all who Raleigh is' Lily said, taking one of the small glass jars out of her pockets.
'But are you sure you want to know what's in there? You wouldn't have to know- you could just hand them all over to the Headmistress when she gets here-' Fides reasoned with her.
'No, there's no time for that. I need to know what Raleigh has been doing to Albus so that I can let her know the minute she walks in' Lily responded in a shaky voice.
She was hurriedly opening jar after jar and tipping each one upside down over the Pensieve. It would be a lie for her to say she wasn't anxious about what she could find in that swirling pool of silver; these were after all the memories that Raleigh had decided Albus should no longer possess for some reason or another. But this was what she had been trying to uncover all along, so that she could prevent him from ever using her brother for his own malicious purposes again.
As she poured in the last memory, Lily took a deep breath. She turned briefly around to address Fides.
'Let me know when the Headmistress arrives' she told him, before plunging her face into the basin.
A/N: Hi, yes sorry for the cliff hanger. I'm currently writing the next chapter and hope to have it up as soon as possible. Reviews/ thoughts/ feedback would be much appreciated xo
