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A/N: Pray thou forgivest me, my lowly subjects--er, I mean loyal fans--for the dire delay in posting of this most abominably late chapter. Blame real life, college finals, my great-nephew's wedding, viral laryngitis. Take heart in the fact that you are not alone in your ire--my supervisor likewise finds the situation most irksome.
My roommate isn't too thrilled with it, either, but she's a real gem! She made me a fruit smoothie when I had no voice and my throat was too sore to take deep breaths. How great is that??? I still sound like a frog that's been marched over by a company of drunken soldiers wearing combat boots, but I'm slowly getting better.
Chapter 18
Another facet of the most recent switch: a heavy gray blanket replaced the once abundant sunlight. Thunderclouds scuttled overhead, their undersides low enough to scrape the topmost leaves of the tallest trees within sight. Air pressure squeezed their heads hard enough to make their ears ache and pop.
Jagged bolts of lightning shot across the sky in three directions, centered in the clouds almost directly overhead. Every hair stood away from their skin. Their flesh pimpled and tingled at the closeness of the deadly power. The air smelled of ozone and heat.
The feline snarl sounded again, closer. The weather, though threatening, became the lesser of the two dangers.
Wand at the ready, Hermione held her wind-whipped hair back from her face with her free hand and angled her body to lessen the impact of gale-force winds. Loose hairs, many of them blackened and curled by the firetrap outside the chamber gates, popped her face and stung her cheeks.
"Your cat, Neville?"
Neville swallowed. "Sounds like it."
The trio stared around the area. They stood at a pentagonal junction between five floral beds. The lowest wall, to their right, reached Snape's shoulder. The tallest, at their rear, stretched five times his height.
One bed overflowed with night-blooming purple jasmine. The next plot over held ancient magnolia trees, with flat, oval leaves the size of a man's torso and limbs heavy with pale white blossoms. The two distinct fragrances melded into a particularly heavy and inescapable aroma.
Neville gagged and covered his mouth even as Hermione choked on the overpowering combination. Golden pollen, kicked up by the storm, swirled around them like a dancing cloud of fairy dust.
"If predators or lightning bolts don't get us," she said, "the flower pollen will."
"Might I suggest," said Snape, "we move away from the area before either event can happen?"
"Too late."
Snape followed Longbottom's frozen gaze.
Hermione sucked in a hard breath.
"It's . . . it's . . . well, it's not as big as I'd thought."
Snape raised a sardonic eyebrow. "That is your 'huge cat,' Mr. Longbottom?"
Hermione lowered her wand and added, "It's barely bigger than Mrs. Norris."
"No, that isn't the same kind of cat I saw before." Neville bristled with indignation. "The other one was tall enough to saddle and ride."
The cat in question crouched on a wall some fifteen feet over their heads. Its size and markings resembled those of an ocelot, the only differences being a change between the ocelot's golden background to a more silvery-blue hue and a tight crown of curly black fur between its tall, tuffed ears.
"Considering the example set for us by the rabbits," Severus Snape said even as the first fat drops of rain stained the walkway, "I recommend that we don't judge anything by size or appearance alone."
"Agreed," Hermione Granger said. "And might I add, evading a prolonged fight is preferable to enduring one, especially one in the middle of a storm."
"I couldn't have said it better myself."
The cat, downwind of the trio, flattened its ears and streamlined itself against the hard gusts. Its nose flared and twitched. The beast wrinkled its nose, sneezed three times, and coughed a feline obscenity. Its tongue worked as though to rid its mouth of a foul taste.
"I suppose he doesn't care for the way we smell," Hermione said. "Probably the rose scent of the Burn-Be-Gone."
"If that is the case," Snape said, "I withdraw my complaint about the fragrance." The professor waved the students to keep going while he guarded their backs. "Move away, the pair of you."
"Uhhh . . . Hermione?" Neville's attention, surprisingly, was not on the cat in front of Snape but rather somewhere toward their rear. "Cats don't hunt in packs . . . do they?"
"They're called 'prides,' Neville," Hermione answered. "Like a lion pride. And yes, while the majority of feline species are solitary hunters, they do sometimes hunt together. Why?"
Neville pointed over her left shoulder and replied, "Because there are two more on the next bed over, headed this way."
Hermione followed his gesture. For a moment, she saw nothing. A stray gust lifted the fat green leaves of a magnolia tree. Movement brought her gaze to where two black-spotted silver cats stalked them from behind.
"If they're anything like lions," Hermione reckoned, "they mean to encircle us, trap us between them, and cut out the weakest."
Snape readied his wand and said, "Then might I suggest we get out of the trap before they close in?"
"They have the advantage of height," Hermione pointed out, even as the two more distant felines closed the distance between them, "not to mention intimate knowledge of the terrain."
"We have brains and magic. I recommend we use both."
"A good running stride would help," Longbottom said.
"My thoughts exactly."
The three humans took off running. Packs flapping against his back, Snape wrangled his younger charges into a tight group ahead of him even as he struggled to track the three stalking felines.
One of the cats leapt onto the walkway ahead of them, blocking the left path. Hermione swished her wand and shouted, "Stupefy!"
She blinked. The cat failed to fall. The sole result of her spell was a shower of sparks off the cat's fur.
"Petrificus!" Snape shouted. The spell had no more effect on the creature at their rear than Hermione's spell had on the one ahead. "Damn! They're magic-resistant!"
"Keep trying! One may get through!"
"Petrificus totalis!" Snape called. Again, the spell enraged the felines with harmless bursts of light. "They're gaining on us! We need to get to higher ground, where they can't fall on us from above. Head up!"
Snape and Hermione shinnied up the nearest ladder. Neville, his attention on the cats behind him, overshot the ascent. Snape snatched the boy by the collar and yanked him off the walkway an instant ahead of a pouncing hunter. The cat spat its frustration and turned mid-leap. A swipe of its open claws missed its prey's leg by no more than an inch.
"Longbottom, where in Merlin's name are you going? Our only chance is to stay together."
The cat gathered its hindquarters, set its balance, and leaped.
Neville, voice high with anxiety, shouted out the first spell that came to mind. The cat screamed, thrashed, and fell away. Seeing the boy's success, his companions quickly fired off the only spell thus far successful against the ocelot-like beasts. First one then the other, the remaining two hunters collapsed to the walkway.
Overbalanced by his attempts to aid Neville's struggles to find foot and handholds on the ladder, Severus Snape tottered on the edge of the raised plant bed. Black-robed arms cartwheeled wildly before the Potions Master lost his balance and toppled onto the spongy loam.
Down on the walkway, the trio of cats flopped around. They yowled, hissed, and snarled but were, for the moment, harmless.
Hermione clung to the ladder and ogled her yearmate, panted for breath, and wheezed, "Jelly legs? We're wracking our brains for advanced spells and you hit it with jelly legs?"
A hot flush rose on Longbottom's cheeks. He, too, dragged in great lungfuls of air.
"It worked, didn't it?"
Freed of the immediate danger, Hermione looked around. "Professor Snape?"
"Get me out of here!"
The students climbed ladder and peered over the top of the border. In the bed below, Severus Snape muttered invectives and wrestled with a pasta knot of purple-leafed vines that seemed determined to curl around him.
Hermione Granger and Neville Longbottom burst into laughter before they could moderate the noise.
"Gryffindors." Snape hissed the word as though it were the vilest curse--to him, perhaps, it was. Lip curled in disgust, he turned away from them and attacked the growth that bound his legs. "You find this funny, do you?"
"Professor," Hermione held up a cautioning hand, "don't move."
"Ms. Granger," Snape took no heed of the student's warning and continued to wrestle with the vines, "I grow rapidly weary of your-"
"I said don't move!"
Snape froze, his hands filled with purple leaves attached to lavender stems as thick around as his largest finger. As many times as the two students had shocked him with their rudeness, he should by now be quite accustomed to the feeling. The Potions Master blinked away his disbelief and opened his mouth to deduct 50 points from Gryffindor.
Straddling the wall in a most unladylike manner, the teenage witch pushed aside a strand of purple-leaf vine with the tip of her wand. She treated the greenery with a blend of concern and fear.
A Slytherin he might be and an ardent opposite of his Gryffindor companions, but Severus Snape could never be described as stupid. Once kicked out of his pique by her unorthodox treatment, he gave more attention to his surroundings, in particular the foliage with which she took such extreme care.
Neville Longbottom sat astride the wall facing his yearmate. Sight of the boy donning a pair or dragonhide gloves cinched the seriousness of the matter.
"Vulcan's vine," Hermione reported, "isn't dangerous in itself, at least not under normal conditions, but when near its reproductive cycle, which this one is, the thorns are unsafe, particularly to any species with magical ability."
"If you do not mind," Snape ground each individual word between his teeth even as he made every effort not to move his plant-tangled limbs, "your time would be better spent freeing me rather than reading back a lecture I myself gave to you in your second year."
"One bright point in all of this," she replied. "You now have conclusive evidence that even Gryffindors listen in your classes."
The final vine slipped away, leaving Snape free to escape the particularly dangerous area.
"Now that I am successfully extracted," Snape said as he made his way down the outside face of the plant bed, "let us continue the search."
"Professor?" Neville pointed with a shaky finger. "Your finger."
Paused before taking the final step down to the pathway, Snape eyed the thin line visible along the outside of his left index finger. A short string of scarlet beads marked the tear in his insipid skin. He blew out a hard breath, completed his descent, and sank to the ground.
Hermione leaped the final distance to the crushed shell path. She dived for the larger of the two packs, unknotted the strings, and buried her head in the open mouth. Her voice was muffled but stern.
"Neville. Get a fire going and fill the smaller cauldron with water."
"I saw suckerfish moss in the next bed over. I'll get some."
"Suckerfish moss will not extract the oil from the cut," Snape said.
"No, it won't," Longbottom agreed even as he trotted across the pathway, climbed the four stone steps, and leaned over the limestone wall around the adjoining bed. The moss in question coated the inner side of the barrier like a thick, pea-green, spongy carpet. "But it will slow it down until we can brew the antidote."
"Unless you want to spend the next few months as a squib?" Hermione asked.
Severus Snape ended the dialogue in typical Slytherin fashion.
"Dammit!"
TBC