Professor Lott had left to get some papers, leaving James to clean out the dozen cauldrons in the room without magic.

As soon as she left, James whipped out a mirror from his bag and muttered, "Sirius Black" into it. Sirius' grinning face soon came to view.

"Having fun cleaning, Prongs?" Sirius asked as he watched James scrub Lott's own cauldron while he sat in Professor McGonagall's classroom.

"Oh yeah, best detention I ever got" James said sarcastically. "What's McGonagall making you do?"

"Essays," Sirius' laconic reply came. "She had this talk with me before she left the room, about how brilliant we were at Transfiguration."

"Oh?"

"Yeah," Sirius continued. "She suggested we could learn to become Animagi when we graduate, said it would be useful." There was a pause, and then both he and James burst out laughing.

"You should be done by seven, right?" Sirius asked James. It was now five, right after their classes ended for the day.

James nodded. "Should be. That gives us an hour to get Peter and the cloak and go find Moony. Wait—Lott's coming." He shoved the mirror back into his back as the woman entered the room.

Two hours later James, Sirius, and Peter were running down the boys' dormitory stairs. James had his invisibility cloak tucked under his arms

"Is Moony there?" Peter asked. "Pomfery usually leads him there by seven, right? Well I remember once she led him there at eight, and it was really late and everything, and Moony was getting pretty pale, but it was because the moon that night had come up a bit early or something, right? I mean…

"Let me check the map," James interrupted him. He opened the piece of parchment in his hands, the pride of the Marauders, and saw that Remus was already at the shack.

"Yeah," James said, then his eyes widened, "Oh, crap!"

"What?" Sirius asked.

"Evans!" James pointed to the entrance to Gryffindor common room and began getting out his cloak from under his arm but the door swung open at that moment and Lily walked in.

"What are you doing here, Potter?" Lily narrowed her eyes at the sight before her. "And what's that?" She leaned her head to look at the Maurauder's Map.

"My homework," James quickly rolled it up.

"Really? I could've sworn words were moving on there…

"We like to add a little zest to our homework," Sirius said, smiling with aplomb at Lily.

"Really, Black?" Lily raised her eyebrows. "What are you doing here anyways?"

"We just got back from detention," James said hastily.

"Didn't you have nighttime detention? Isn't that why you couldn't go duel with me? Well, since your detention was early, we can go tonight…

"No!" The three Marauders quickly said. Lily looked at them queerly.

"Er, we have something to do tonight," James moved towards the door while Sirius and Peter followed. "See you around, Evans," He disappeared. Lily looked at their retreating backs with a look of curiosity and perplexity before turning around and moving up to her room.

……………………………………………………….

"Hey, Anne!" Lily hissed, standing on her own bed as she shook her friend violently. "Anne!"

Anne was a deep sleeper. She finally woke up after several moments of Lily's attack. "What?" She said grumpily, still not opening her eyes.

"I think there's something moving on the grounds," Lily said quietly as she pointed to their window.

"Good for you, now let me sleep," Anne didn't bother to turn around.

"No, really! Look! Ow!" Lily tugged at her arm only to have Anne smack her pillow on top of her head. She looked at Elain on the other side of the room and contemplated waking her up, but it was doubtful she could do it without waking up everyone in the room.

So Lily crawled to the window herself and peered out again. She had woken up in the middle of the night for no particular reason at all and found herself staring upon a group of strange creatures on the grounds.

They were much closer now. There seemed to be a wolfish creature, a humungous, bear-like dog, a stag, and something bobbing along behind them. They were running around joyously in the moonlight, and seemed to enjoy themselves.

Lily blinked. She wondered if she was seeing things.

Her eyes fell on the stag's large and powerful antlers and she gasped. The intake of breath was sharp and cold, and her eyes widened with it. Images of McGonagal's class, working with James, and the Marauder's weirdly absurd nicknames for each other flashed in her head.

She looked from the stag to the dog to the wolf and to the bobbing thing, and even though she couldn't see what it was, Lily knew that whatever was running behind the other three was a rat.