Lily's New Friend
Chapter 6
"Lily run..."
Lily had convinced Adrian and Fran to get to know James, Sirius, Remus, and Peter. It didn't take much to get Fran to start talking to them, but Adrian was another story — she still couldn't forgive them for being so arrogant for the past five years. This wasn't that big of a problem, though, for Adrian was spending most of her time with John. They had started dating right after the dance.
But everything changed one afternoon in late November.
Fran and Lily were sitting with the Marauders. Fran was in the middle of a game of chess with Sirius, and Lily was helping James with a difficult charm they had to learn (charms was one of her better subjects).
They all stopped what they were doing when they saw Adrian run past them up to the girl's dorm room. "Oh no," Lily thought.
"James, I'll be back down later to help you , okay? I have to go and talk to Adrian," Lily said.
"Sirius, I have to go, too, okay? See you tomorrow," said Fran as she and Lily ran up to see what was wrong with Adrian.
They walked into the room and heard muffled crying from the far end of the room where Adrian's bed was. They looked at one another and headed over to her. She was lying on her stomach with her face against a pillow.
"Adrian, what's the matter?" asked Lily kneeling nest to her bed and patting her back to make her feel better.
"John, I saw... I saw him kissing . . .," but another wave of tears over took her then and she had to stop.
"Kissing whom?" asked Fran wanting to know who it was so that she would go and curse the little slut, whoever she was.
"It was Vivian, that pretty Slitherin girl," cried Adrian, looking up at her friends through very watery eyes.
"Adrian, I never want to hear the words 'pretty Slitherin' from you again! Do you understand?" said Lily with a smile, trying to lighten up the room.
Adrian smiled for a second and almost laughed, which made Lily feel that at least she had helped a little.
"That's awful, Adrian! I hope you broke up with him right then and there," said Fran. Lily gave her a look because this statement had triggered another wave of fresh tears.
Lily hugged Adrian and said, "It's going to be all right, you'll find some one better. Plus, didn't you just tell us the other day that he was exceptionally annoying at times?"
"Yeah, that's right, Adrian," said Fran giving her a hug too, "You can find someone better! He doesn't deserve you if he is going to treat you like that! Okay?"
"Not yet, but with you two as best friends, I know I will be fine in no time," said Adrian with a shadow of a grin on her face.
Lily and Fran stayed up in their room for a while to calm Adrian down. By the time this was done and Adrian had fallen asleep, it was nearly eleven. Fran went right to bed, but Lily had told James she would help him with his homework, so she was obligated to make her way back down the girls' staircase to the common room.
When she got there, the common room was deserted, "Guess he was too tired to wait," Lily thought as she walked over to the table where they had been and grabbed her things. As she walked back across the room to the stairs up to her dormitory, she heard voices behind her.
"Oh, look who's here, Prongs," said a voice. Lily spun around and looked about the empty common room.
Then another voice said, "Shut up Padfoot!"
Lily thought, 'That sounded strangely like Sirius and James, but no, if they where in here, surely I would see them."
She turned around, heading again towards her dormitory stairs. She went up a couple of the stairs and then kept walking in place, moving her feet more and more softly so that whoever was in the common room would think she was leaving. Then she stepped into a small broom cupboard, and there that she opened and shut the door as quietly as if a dorm room door were closing upstairs. Then she heard it, the sound she had been waiting for, the sound of the portrait hole shutting. Lily spun around and jumped down the stairs leaving her books on the stairs behind her. She ran over and went through the portrait hole. Lily walked a little way down the corridor when she heard the voices again. "Sirius, you idiot! She heard us!"
"I used your nickname so that she wouldn't know it was us, James. You're just being a spoilsport," said a voice that obviously belonged to Sirius.
"You two just shut up or we'll get caught, cloak or no cloak," said a third voice, this one very squeaky and most definitely Peter's.
Lily followed the boys' voices and footsteps until she looked around the corner to the first floor landing and she saw none other than Peeves the poltergeist, who was passing down the hallway, making all of the pictures crooked.
"Shoot," Lily thought. "Ooh look! The front doors are opening! Maybe if I run into a classroom I can see if they take off the cloak."
Lily ran into a nearby classroom while Peeves' back was turned. As Lily looked out the window onto the front lawn of the school, he saw nothing for a couple of minutes. She was about to go back up to her room, thinking that James, Sirius, and Peter had just gone into the forest with the cloak still on. Lily was tuning around to leave when something caught her eye; all of a sudden three boys had appeared next to the Whomping Willow.
"Adire vox," said Lily, and then she could hear every word that the three boys were saying. This was a useful little charm she had learned from one of the many books in the library.
"Okay now, let's hope this works," said Peter doubtfully.
"Peter, we know it works! We just have to hope no one is looking from the windows and that you don't get stuck halfway through like last time," Sirius told Peter as James snorted with laughter.
"Okay now Peter, once we have transformed, then you need to crawl under the branches and hit the knot just right," said James, more serious now.
"Yes James, I know but which one of you am I going to ride on?" asked Peter. Remus might try to eat me since I am so small."
"It doesn't matter who you ride on — both of us will protect you if Remus tries to get you. Either of us can fight a wolf if it comes to that," said Sirius reassuring Peter who was scared.
" What do they mean by transform?" thought Lily , "and what do they mean about Remus getting Peter, and fighting a wolf?" She looked back down to see what her friends were doing now.
"Okay, are you two ready?" asked James. The other two nodded, and if Lily
had not been so far away then she would have noticed how pale all three of them had turned. "Then on the count of three, okay? One, two, three!"
Next Lily saw two animals, not three, but then within a minute the Whomping Willow's branches stopped flying around like giant fists and looked as though they had been frozen where they were. Then she saw one of the animals, a stag, lower its beautiful antlers and bend its sleek brown body through what seemed to be a hole in the roots of the tree. The stag was then followed by the other animal. As she watched a large black dog crawled through the hole in the roots of the tree, only then did she realize what they were.
"They're animagi," she thought, "but I wonder what Remus has to do with any of this."
Lily turned away from the window and reached the door of the room. She opened it carefully and peeked out to see if Peeves was still there. As she reached the hall that would lead her up to the Gryffindor common room, she could see the marble staircase that would take her to the front doors of the school. Lily was torn. She knew that the smart thing to do would be to go up to her dorm and get a good night's sleep, but she was also very curious about why three of her friends were animagi and why they would be sneaking into the roots of a rather violent tree. She looked at her watch — midnight.
Lily wouldn't be Lily if she didn't follow up on her questions (one of the reasons she was such a good student). So instead of going up to the dorm as her head told her was the smart and intelligent thing to do, as usual she ignored her head and went with her gut instinct to figure out what was up.
Lily crept quietly out the front doors of the castle and out on to the front lawn where she ran quickly over to the Whomping Willow. The branches of the tree had started to swing again and then to her amazement they stopped. She looked over to where her friends had climbed down into the hole and low and behold a gray fat rat was sitting on a knot on one of the trees thick roots. As Lily watched the rat it looked up and its small black eyes became wide as if in shock, and gave a great squeak of surprise, "If rats could be shocked," thought Lily.
At the squeak she heard growl and a bark in response. The hairs stood up on the back of Lily's neck, and she knew that she didn't want whatever was in that hole to come out. Her head was telling her over and over to run to run as fast as was possible back up to the castle, but she was too scared and too curious to do anything but stand and wait.
As Lily watched the hole the stag came out. Its regal head appeared in the hole as it emerged and for some reason — she didn't understand why — the sight of it made her feel at ease even though she was scared. She watched as the stag's large muscular body came out of the tree and rushed over to her. Lily looked in its eyes as it neared. They were deep blue eyes, and she saw a spark of fear in them. That was when Lily realized she was in more danger than she had thought, for the spark of fear in the animal's eye convinced her more than anything that her head had been telling her.
She turned, but before she had even started to run back to the castle there was a loud growl from the tree, and it made her stop in her tracks. She spun around to look at the thing that was growling, and to her horror there stood a full grown werewolf. His long snout was pointing at her, his nostrils were dilated as he sniffed the air, and his yellow eyes were both fixed on her. She wanted to run, but she couldn't. The stag tried to push her away with its nose, but she was stuck. Then just as it seemed that the werewolf was ready to charge, the head of a huge dog came out of the hole and locked its jaw onto the werewolf's hind leg. The dog was restraining the werewolf from attacking her, and she looked back at the stag that was still pushing her with his nose towards the castle.
Then all of a sudden another voice entered her head. It did not belong to her, but it did not scare her — it did the opposite. It soothed her so that she wasn't scared and was able to run. She heard it all the way back to the castle. "Lily run! Run now while we hold him off! Run, Lily! You're going to be okay! Just run!"
AN: Sorry I took so long. Please read and review. Hope you enjoy!
REVIEW
J J J J J J :P