Chapter One: Girl in the Valley
The sun had already ignited across the street and through my window when I woke up. Little bright rays were poking sternly at my eyes – I shifted so that they were facing my back and looked at my clock. It read eight thirty-nine.
I lay still for a while, watching the shadows on the wall disappear as gradually the little rays of light flew up and flooded the whole room in warmth and sunshine. Once again was the village dipped into another morning, the start of yet another drowsy, hot day.
It was my cue to get up and get going like I normally did most mornings, but I just buried myself deeper in bed, brushing away the straying brown strands of hair from where they had resided over my face.
Tap, tap, tap. The familiar sound of a hard surface tapping on glass. I turned over to gaze at the window, where the massive form of my friend was perched.
She raised her wings – her feathers flashed a rusty red in the sunlight – and she scrabbled at the window sill with her three-inch copper talons, giving a muffled whistle. It was muffled because of the limp, dead body of a shrew that she had, clamped proudly in her hooked raptor's beak.
Torque is a red tailed hawk, resident over our spot of land and most of the valley from above. Our friendship goes back a long way, when I was eight and we had found her lying injured in our Asphodel garden. Since the moment we had healed her, she'd made it her normal routine to visit us every week, sometimes accompanying us to places like Diagon Alley, or on bushwalks up the hills surrounding the valley that our village was in.
That is, those days Pop had been available most of the time.
I swung my legs over the side of my mattress and slid off the bed – I'm not exactly on the big side. I hurried to the window and pushed the glass up. Almost immediately, Torque hopped in and deposited the dead shrew onto the carpet. I made a mental note to clean it up later and gave Torque a reasonable pat of gratitude.
"For me? Thanks, big girl. You gonna join me for breakfast?" She hopped down onto the floor and began footing her way to the door like she owned the place. I stretched, yawning, before following her out into the hallway. On the way to the staircase, I stopped by Pop's room and peeked in. "Pop? Are you there?"
Nothing. The bed was still neatly made, with the corners of the sheets tucked under the mattress in the way I usually did them. I sighed – whatever they were doing in the Ministry of Magic, it had been keeping my grandfather busy for two weeks now.
He's a very respectable man, my Pop. God knows why they even let him in the Ministry, after all the trouble he had caused in the past…
Have you heard of the Rastricks? You should have. Most everybody who's wizard kind knows the history, legend, and curse of this unholy family, dating back from 577 BC. Not that it's a nice thing to know, but it's us who've got to live with it.
Basically, almost every generation of my family have been there and done that. Meaning, we've been one of the worst wizarding families for ages and ages. All those before me had been power-hungry, ruthless, killing off both Muggle-kind and wizard kind, or whoever dared to get in their way. You should say that we were a troupe of Dark wizards.
My Pop had been one. Nowadays he's nothing like what he had been before, whatever he had been like. My Pop had repented at an early age, one of the few Rastricks who ever turned away from evil once they had started.
He and I are the only Rastricks left in the world. Or we would've…
My father. Richard Rastrick, formerly known as Richie to his schoolmates and peers. Just another one of the many evil wizards that came from my line of the family, except many reckon that he's got to be the most cunning, maybe even the most powerful of all the Rastricks.
Once a Rastrick, always a Rastrick. That's what they used to say in the valley. People have put bets on whether I was going to turn out as bad as he was. The story is that I had been born to an anonymous mother far off from Britain, while a war was raging against Richard and his followers. Richard, broken and bleeding from the battle, had taken the duty of delivering me to Pop himself in London. He hadn't stayed long, just long enough to pass on a message as he handed me over to his shocked, pale-faced dad…
"Kora…she's a beauty, isn't she?…Take care of my baby for me…I'll be back…"
Before that moment, my Pop had not seen his son for over ten years. After that, whenever he would be telling me that story, he would exclaim how he was torn between two decisions: kill Richard on the spot and risk hurting me, or accept me and let Richard go on his way.
From then on, reports have been filed all over the world about battles, destruction, death, victims…all under the control of my father. Many had thought that he was going to join forces with the Dark Lord Voldemort, before he succumbed to Harry Potter four years ago at Godrick's Hollow, but he never did. I guess my father had wanted to keep it in the family…
People are convinced that Richard had literally meant his last words to my Pop – "I'll be back" – and that one day he would he would track me down and take me. We would pledge terror on the world, and it would help greatly if I did happen to turn out as bad as he was.
My Pop is a wonderful man. He's trying hard to make amends to what is left of our family, and although he was gone at the moment I knew that he was still going hard at it, whatever he was doing. I did miss him – I had been left literally home alone with nobody to talk to except a bird. After all, you would expect the daughter of a deranged mad wizard to be socially isolated from everybody else's kids, even if everyone did like her grandfather and practically worshipped him in the Ministry. It was no wonder we lived so secluded from everybody else.
I put out some cold meat on the kitchen table, leaving it under the mercy of Torque's vicious beak. Then I made some eggs for myself and wondered when Pop was coming home. Moreover, I wondered how much money I had left from the thirty-five Galleons Pop had left on my bureau the day he had left to go to work two weeks ago. After I had worked it out, I looked at Torque. It was time to go out again, and it was essential that I took someone with me in order for myself not to lose my head in the crowd…all the staring…the whispers…the talking as soon as I was too far off to hear…it pained me so much, I was almost ashamed of being who I was…nevertheless…
"Well, Torque…fancy a walk to Diagon Alley?"