Chapter 3 - Caught in the Act
The image in the well faded away as a cloud drifted across the sun. She sighed and got to her feet. Her knees were stained green from kneeling in the grass, and bits of dried, dead grass clung to them. She leaned over to brush them off when something sparkled in the grass. She pushed aside the blades of grass and gently picked up the object that had caught the sunlight, and her eye. It was a ring. The band was made of thin plain gold. At least, she thought it was real gold. Its weight felt right in the palm of her hand, and it had a rich inner glow that gold plating couldn't seem to imitate.
She held it between her thumb and index finger, looking for an inscription, but there was nothing. Not even a mark to say how many carats it had. She slipped the ring onto the index finger on her right hand. It fit snuggly, so she shifted it to her other hand. There it fit perfectly.
For a moment she admired the way it looked, then she checked the time on her watch. Three hours had passed since she left the house. Her parents would be worried, she thought guiltily. Really, she couldn't blame them for that. And they didn't even know the half of it. Perhaps she wasn't being completely fair to her mum and dad.
Pedalling quickly, she was soon back on a paved road, heading towards home. Several blocks from her house she stopped at a red light. Coming down the sidewalk to the left, a boy was walking with his face buried in a book. Hermione smiled. She sometimes did the same thing. When she had read Hogwarts: A History for the first time, her father had threatened to have one of his doctor friends surgically remove the book from the end of her nose. Her grin faded when she thought of her father in happier times. Things had gotten so complicated since then.
Then, abruptly, time froze. From the corner of her eye she saw splash of red bouncing onto the street. Her breath caught. A little girl laughing loudly, ran after the ball with outstretched hands. Hermione screamed, but was soon drowned out by the sound of squealing tires. Down Hermione reached to grasp her wand. It was strapped to her bike where most people kept their water bottles.
"Expello!" she shouted, performing a banishing charm.. The little girl flew through the air onto the lawn, rolling a bit as she hit the grass. Her ball was a puddle of red under the car's wheel. All around her cars slammed on their brakes and people emerged from their cars waving cell phones and running towards the sobbing child sitting on the grass.
Hermione stood watching from the other side of the street. The girl was fine. She could hear her telling the newly arrived ambulance attendants to go away. It was obvious from their amazed cries that everyone thought the little girl had been struck by the car and tossed onto the side of the road.
Relief that the little girl was okay (she could hear her demanding her ball back) gave way to the growing horror that she, Hermione Granger, had just broken a very serious wizarding law - the law that forbade underage wizards to cast spells while not in school. Even worse, she had done it right on the corner of a busy street. Thankfully, no one seemed to have noticed.
She turned her bike around to take a different route home and came face to face with a pair of round blue eyes. It was the boy with the book. The book lay at his feet now, face down on the cement, with pages bent underneath its weight.
"It was you," he whispered.
To Hermione it sounded like the final judgment. Reason fled. Her heart was doing its best to leap from her chest. She bolted. Running beside her bike, panting with fear, she put her left foot on the pedal and swung her body over the frame. Visions of hard-eyed Ministry owls chased her down the street. She kept her head down and pedalled harder. A quick glance over her shoulder told her that the stunned looking Muggle had broken out of his stupor and had begun to run after her. She should have realized that the tall young boy could never have caught up, but rational thought was impossible in the face of her fears. There was an odd ringing in her ears, then...
"Pop!"
Hermione's bike hit the back of her father's car and she sailed, once again, over the handlebars and rolled across the trunk. With a dull "Thud" she hit the driveway of interlocking red stones and watched the world shrink to a pinprick of light before it faded to black.
