Palma de Animus - Chapter One

By: PhoenixStAr

Rating: PG-13

October 6, 2003

A/N: I actually had a LOT of fun writing this chapter... muchos gracias to shelli, the only reviewer of the newly revised prologue. ^^ I know it's been a while, and I'm sorry, but a month isn't really THAT long... ^^; Reviews are always welcomed and appreciated.

**

Harry Potter woke up with a start, smothering an impending scream with his flimsy pillow. The dreams were back. He had started to take dreamless sleep potions nightly since the end of the last school year, but they had started to lose their effectiveness, now that he was almost a month into it. The dreams had slowly started to creep back into his sleep -- uneventful and unmemorable at first, but tonight's dream...

The thin sixteen-year-old boy put his glasses on with a shudder. It was worse than that time with Frank Bryce. Wormtail had failed Voldemort again, but it was nothing a well-placed Crucio couldn't fix... Bellatrix was sobbing... something about a portal... something that couldn't be... Slayed?

With a shaky hand, Harry jotted down whatever remnants of the dream remained on a page ripped out of one of Dudley's old game magazines. He would send it to Dumbledore when Hedwig woke up. The darkness, the high-pitched laugh intermingled with the horrified screams, the one hoarse yell that stood out from the rest, his godfather's voice, 'HARRY!'

It was familiar, and the thought made Harry sick to the stomach. Sirius was dead. It would do him no good to mull on it, or to dream about him being anything but dead, because he was dead. And it was all Snape's fault. His entire body trembled, no longer from fear or shock, but from anger. The bloody git --

His thoughts were cut off when a sharp rap brought his attention to the window. Pig, Ron's owl, fluttered in front of it with a scrap of parchment on his right leg. Harry quickly let the overexcited owl in, before it could start rapping against the windows again. Moody may have scared his Uncle Vernon back at the train station, but the thought of someone discovering Harry's secret was infinitely scarier to Vernon.

It was just nearing dawn, now, so Harry put Pig into the cage with Hedwig, careful to warn him not to wake her up. He unravelled the note to read a message penned in a hasty, but elegant script.

Hello, Harry,

Be ready for one of us to pick you up tomorrow. Must go now, the twins have returned with some more new products to test on the horrible painting.

Love, Molly.

It was hastily written and vague -- but the little information on the twins and the "horrible painting" was enough to assure Harry that this was actually a note from Mrs. Weasley, and not another trap of Voldemort's. Perhaps he was being paranoid, but there was nothing wrong with keeping a constant vigilance, after all...

Another sharp rap hit against the window, jolting Harry out of his thoughts once more. It was someone on a broom this time, wearing bright green robes with an equally shocking shade of green shade of hair. She wasn't exactly familiar looking, but he could only think of one person that could possibly look like that. He strode towards the window, and opened it, grinning at the woman who was now standing on the broom in a balancing act. "Wotcher, Harry!"

"Tonks!" The female Metamorphmagus was already climbing in through the window, dragging her broom behind her.

"Ready to go?"

"Now? The letter said tomorrow!" Harry looked down at the piece of parchment in his hand again. It was dated 'The twenty-seventh of July,' and that had been... a few hours ago. "Oh. Never mind, then."

"Not packed then, I guess?" Tonks waved her wand, whispering a packing spell. Clothes folded over theirselves messily; books slammed shut, heedless of whatever papers may have been caught in between pages; potion bottles clinked together as they hurriedly dropped into Harry's potion kit. "Oops, hope nothing broke there. Must rush... we only have five minutes to get out of Surrey before Moody and the others lose the cloak, so you'll have to be quick on your broom. You do have it, don't you?" She smiled indulgently when Harry pulled his Firebolt out from under the bed. "Perfect, I'll take your trunk with me and I'll hook Hedwig's cage onto you." Tonks was going about things so quickly that Harry didn't have much opportunity to say much. "Remember, quickly now. We only have five minutes."

Within seconds, they were flying beside the rising sun, wind blowing in their hair and ruffling Hedwig and Pig's wings. In short, Harry hadn't felt this happy in quite a while. He followed Tonks as she whizzed this way and that, and tried to match the pattern of which they were flying to the one they had flown last summer, when they had flown to Grimmauld Place. Strangely enough, he couldn't. "Er... where exactly are we going?" There was no response, so he assumed she couldn't hear him over the wind. "Where are we going?" he asked, louder this time.

Still no response.

Tonks was pressing faster than ever before him, and he found himself pushing his Firebolt to catch up. He could see her spiky short hair lengthening, darkening into a chestnut brown. Perhaps she was changing her apperance again, on a whim? But then her previously lanky body started thinning out even more, making the lime green robes hang off her body much like Dudley's clothes did off Harry.

In a rocky jolt, the woman in front of Harry veered to the left -- he had trouble following, with Hedwig on his tail, but he could see why she had suddenly careened. There was a small dot flying towards their direction, picking up speed and nearing them faster than any normal broom should be able to go. "YOU HAG!" shrieked the billowing black mass of robes, distinguishable only by a head of green hair. The new arrival dived after the speeding witch, closing in quickly, seemingly fuelled by her anger. "How dare you?!" She was followed by a group of assorted wizards and witches, all clutching onto their brooms with one hand and wielding a wand with the other.

As the group of wizards and witches neared him, Harry began to make out some of the people. "Calm down, Tonks!" The deep, normally calm voice belonged to Kingsley Shacklebolt, bald head glistening in the sun, as he shot after the witch that just flew past Harry.

Tonks? That couldn't have been Tonks, Tonks had picked him up from his home, and... Harry's eyes widened in horror when he realised what had almost happened. Kingsley was followed closely by Mad-Eye Moody, McGonagall, and a girl that Harry didn't recognize. It was possible to imitate one auror, if one was lucky, but to imitate and entire group of Dumbledore's hand-picked wizards... How could he have been so stupid?

One of the robed figures lingered behind to where Harry was hovering, in shock of the trap he almost fell for. "All right there, Harry?"

"Professor Lupin!" A breath of relief escaped from his lips.

"Just wait here, Harry. They'll take care of this." The two hovered there, watching the fray.

Off in the distance, Harry could see spells being cast at the fake Tonks, but she -- whoever she was -- was doing an amazing job of dodging the spells. She'd turned around, grabbed her own wand, and when the wind finally blew her hair out of her face, Harry recognized her -- Bellatrix Lestrange! Her face was gaunt and hollow, but there was a manical gleam in her eyes as she avoided the spells and cast her own. Even from where he was, he could almost hear her shriek 'Avada Kedavra!' as she pointed her wand at Moody. Moody, however, was quick enough to lay low on his broom and roll to the side, a move that Harry would have never expected the disfigured Auror to be capable of.

Meanwhile, the girl that Harry couldn't place a name on was oddly awkward. She clung onto her broom tensely, as if afraid to break it by clutching it too hard. Her spells were limited to 'Stupefy!' and 'Petrificus Totalus!', and she looked hardly older than Harry himself. He watched in interest as she threw her hands up in exasperation as she missed Bellatrix, yet again, and stuff her wand in her pocket. Why on earth would they bring a girl that was so obviously unexperienced?

He got his answer.

The girl moulded her body to her broom and tucked her feet in, using the niche in her heeled boots to latch onto the end of her broom. With a loud "Yeehaw!", she zoomed towards Bellatrix, who was preoccupied with keeping McGonagall and Kingsley at bay. She twisted her body just before she neared the Death Eater, and just as Bellatrix realised what was happening, she collided with her and shouldered her off the broom.

Everything seemed to go in slow motion from then. The wand flew out of Bellatrix's hand as she screamed bloody murder. She fell with her back arched, in a position that was very similar to that of her cousin's death a few months ago. She hit the ground with a sickening crack.

"Guess I should've caught her," came the voice of the small blonde girl that Harry still didn't know the name of. She began to fly towards the ground at a leisurely pace, leather jacket fluttering off her small frame.

Traditionally, witches and wizards were never the physical sort, and seeing as that girl really wasn't a bludger, the entire group was a bit overwhelmed, as one could imagine. Grins peeked out of the grim faces, and Harry could swear he heard Moody say that he 'always knew there were some smarts in that girl.'

Down on the ground, though, Bellatrix was not yet defeated, despite the fact that she was having trouble breathing. The pain was nothing compared to a Crucio, she could deal. The blonde girl was the first to land, the real Tonks a close second. "You're lucky I don't kill humans," she said, grinding her heel into Bellatrix's hand as she attempted to reach for her wand. "And you're even more lucky that I'm too much of a lady to beat you within an inch to death." She picked up the wand that Bellatrix was struggling for, and snapped it in half without hesitation. "Here you go, Minnie!"

Minerva pursed her lips at the use of the nickname, but received the broken wand from the cheerful girl anyway, with just a roll of her eyes. Moody cast a binding spell and a containment spell on Bellatrix, and Kingsley amusedly replaced Bellatrix's bright green robes with a uniform black one, handing the green ones back to Tonks, who very firmly told him that she would never, ever wear those contaminated robes ever again, thank you very much, and that he was free to do with them as he pleased. Of course, a man like Kingsley had little to do with a set of lime green robes, so he would set them on fire, he said, but was stopped before he could even reach for his wand when Tonks grabbed the robes huffily, mumbling something about not really meaning what she had said.

There was a bruise on her cheek, Harry noticed, a few scratches along her arm, and a small clump of hair missing near the base of her head. "Bellatrix attacked Tonks last night when she was sending off Pig on Molly's behalf. She took her robes, and enough hair to add to the polyjuice potion she had in a flask before speeding off after Pig." At the moment, Tonks was prying off her shoes off Bellatrix's feet in a rough manner.

"Harry?" He turned around to see the dangerously bludger-like girl. "Hi, I'm Buffy Summers."

He shook her offered hand awkwardly. The girl had just violently attacked and threatened a Death Eater, after all. "Er... you're American?"

"Just a little bit," Buffy grinned. "Tell me a bit about Hogwarts, Minnie's a bit skimpy on the details."

"That's Minerva to you, Ms. Summers!"

"Right, right, whatever you say." Buffy hooked an arm around Harry's, and Harry suddenly understood how it was possible for Ron to burn such a bright red. "So while these adult figures work their mojo and do the cleaning up thing, you can give me the 411 on Hogwarts. There's only so much information you can get out of Minnie and Hogwarts: The History. I think a first-hand perspective would be nice, if that's where I'm gonna be this year."

"You'll be coming to Hogwarts?"

"Yup," she nodded her head emphatically. "I don't have anywhere better to be, so I figured, why not?"

The wise words of the Weasley twins slipped their way out of his mouth before he could stop them. "Absolutely corking!"

**

TBC...