Two:

Sectumsempra

We spent that night in the attic, afraid to come down. We had readily accepted the possibility that Rys could be a werewolf, which opened up a vast new world of magic for us. We were so excited, yet sorta dreading that it might just be a cruel dream or something.

Jason was so ready to begin self-learning magic, I reckon he must've stayed up the rest of that night practicing Wingardium Leviosa. Swish and flick. Experiminting with the left hand, right hand, one direction, opposite direction... Despite the fact that we didn't have wands, and no one in the Harry Potter books ever did anything without them, Jason still practiced with his hands.

His enthusiasm was catchy, but me and Ben, or at least just me, soon got pretty tired of waving our hands to the symphony of growls and howls and crashes from downstairs, and watching everything remain stubbornly grounded.

I do remember being in the dim lit attic practicing the first magical spell that appeared in the novels, then lying on my side in the attic flooded with early sunlight. In both cases, Jason had been steadily practicing Wingardium Leviosa. I'd love to say that after what seemed like a complete night's practice, that Jason had gotten the hang of it. But either he didn't have a wand, or he was simply a muggle. Everything in that attic was in it's normal place, safely on the floor, completely oblivious to Jason's persistant orders to fly.

We stayed in the attic for the next few hours, going down only when Ben's stomach got the better of reasonable thinking. The downstairs room was a mess. It looked like Hurricane Katrina had hit it, cept this wasn't possible cause that hurricane was in America, and hurricanes aren't supposed to hit this part of the world anyway.

Before we went to the kitchen, we searched the place carefully for Rys, or a werewolf that was normally Rys. We knew that werewolves were supposed to be dangerous, so don't call us total idiots for being unarmed.

In the first place, this is Australia... so you can blame the country's laws if us fourteen year olds didn't have any decent weapon past a cricket bat. In the second place, none of us were really sure of how to use a gun... Shut up, we weren't scared, just we didn't see how a gun could help us cause we didn't want to kill anything... yeah.

Why am I even talking about guns... there wasn't even a gun in the house. That I knew about. So... ok, we were armed. Someone had conveniently thrown a collection of solid, wooden, heavy, American baseball bats that were reinforced with metal plates in the attic. No joke. So we kinda helped ourselves to them.

So we're exploring the house right, kinda more difficult than it should've been considering that we had basically lived there most nights of the week since year seven. It looked really strange with broken, torn furniture, and electronic equipment, and flyscreen doors, and family pets... all broken and mutilated.

Ok, so the family pets weren't hurt in anyway, just threw that in there to make it look more dramatic... But if the family pets were injured, they had all been eaten whole or something cause we couldn't find any bit of them anywhere.

The house was more creepy, it was like all quiet, except when the wind whistled, or what was left of a door slammed, or something else... then the house was noisy, and we all shrank against walls and stared around like we were expecting an attacking army of invisable smurfs or something.

So yeah. We were kinda scared, but I reckon that you would be too if it was a quiet, ruined house and there was a dangerous werewolf somewhere around. And you're probably armed with more than a baseball bat. Probably live in the States where they let you have good weapons.

Still, there's only so many times you can explore a wrecked house safely without giving up. So on about the third search of the place, we heard another sound. It was no door or anything, it was clearly Ben's stomach.

Ok, so we were hungry. We gave up the search, assuring ourselves that Rys would probably be Rys again now that it was daylight. And we went and made breakfast. The kitchen bench wasn't ruined, and the cupboards were too high up for anything, or anyone shorter than Ben to reach.

Don't call us irresponsible. We were scared ok. And it really was all Rys's fault we were freaked. And Rys's safety and well-being isn't our responibility anyway. I know we're friends, but when we became friends, we weren't really counting on having to help a rabid werewolf.

So nobody thought of trying to find Rys, or help him out. We figured that Rys had lived here for ages, so he knew his way around, and home, well enough. Actually our main concern was hiding the damaged house from Rys's parents when they came home in two days time.

We were eating breakfast, weetbix with mountains of sugar and honey (only way you can eat those things, they're so yuck without enough flavouring). Jason, again, began waving his hand back and forth... wing-GAAR-dium levi-OO-sa... at least he was pronouncing it right.

"Jason, stop it alright." said Ben. I reckon he was pretty annoyed with Jason, hey so was I ok, I won't lie. I reckon that anyone would be annoyed with someone if they insisted on reciting flying charms that didn't work.

"wing-GAAR-dium levi-OO-sa" responded Jason. Damit...

I kinda don't know how it happened next. My main guess was that Ben was so annoyed, his annoyance was basically anger by now, and having to eat weetbix (Ben hated weetbix) didn't help nothing either.

And then we had spent the last hour tiptoeing round the house, jumping at small noises... hey, that got kinda stressful after a small time. Anyways, for all these apparent reasons and probably many more, Ben snapped it. He had just told Jason to stop Wingardium Leviosa-ing, but no...

"SECTUMSEMPRA!" yelled Ben, throwing his right hand in a kinda straight diagonal movement through the air between himself and Jason. I think he was only doing it to mock Jason, to sorta make the persistant guy see sense and friggin stop reciting the most basic harry potter spell.

So it don't really matter why, or how. Just that it worked. It actually did. Sectumsempra... like a magical sword thingy. So Ben yelled, and this nice, clean diagonly cut appeared on three things: Jason, the wall behind Jason, and that portrait of Rys's old uncle Norman. At first the wall and the portrait wasn't really noticed; the blood spraying out of Jason's cheek was sufficient to hold our attention. Jason swore, and ran off to the bathroom.

Ben's face had gone white, and he was staring at his hand like it was a fragile land-mine or something. But... it had worked. It might've been more considerate to think of Jason and his cut face, but... it had worked...

"Woah" I said, sounding like the kids in those adds for the latest plastic space toy. Still, I was pretty impressed. Jason had been trying the simplest charm all night, no succsess whatsoever, and now Ben just performed a high level curse first go. Maybe poor Jason simply wasn't a wizard...

But me. Maybe I could be a wizard too... I mean, Wingardium Leviosa hadn't worked for Ben either... I looked for a target that I could slash up. The loungeroom couch looked ok. Well it didn't, but that was all Rys's fault. No one would notice one extra scratch in it...

Jumping up from the table, I karate-chopped my hand through the air in the general direction of the couch. At the same time, I yelled out the incantation.

"SECTUMSEMPRA!"

I'd like to say that this massive rip appeared in the couch, one that hadn't been there before, but if you asked Ben he would tell you otherwise and then I'd be caught out lying. So, no massive rip appeared in the couch. A massive rip appeared on nothing. I didn't even make a tiny little scratch on anything.

"Maybe you gotta be annoyed. Get angry at the couch." suggested Ben tentitavly.

So many strange things had happened since last night; up there beside everything else this suggestion sounded pretty logical. I tried to hate the couch. It was kinda hard to do. That couch had never done anything to me, and it looked pretty sad all torn up as it was. Still, I tried. As soon as I thought I was angry enough, I raised my hand up, and swung it back down fast, repeating the incantation.

"SECTUMSEMPRA!"

A huge, clean, unmistakeable cut broke through the couch, like a really sharp knife had gone through it. Ha ha ha lol. Not. I so wish but, really. Nah, the couch didn't get cut at all. I couldn't do Sectumsempra any better than any of us could do Wingardium Leviosa.

"Here, move Jason." said Ben. I obliged, and moved. Ben sat there a moment, giving the couch a seriously evil death glare. The intensity of Ben's stare would've made me laugh under normal circumstances, but... now, it weren't really normal circumstances anymore. After he'd had his short moment of staring down the couch, he, without warning or changing his stare at all, just flicked his hand and yelled.

"SECTUMSEMPRA!"

I stood and stared at the result. This huge tear had appeared in the couch, where there wasn't one before. I looked from the couch, to Ben and back again. Then I looked at Ben again. I was jealous. You can probably understand that.

Well, maybe you can't; maybe you say I should've been there patting him on the back and saying congrats, but no... I'd practiced magic as long as he had; forget Jason, and never did anything... and he just... just... like that. On his second go at that curse, and he got it right both times. No fair.

It was about now that the truth should've been coming to us. The harsh truth, the one that said that Ben was a wizard; he could do magic. And me and Jason were muggles. There was no way on earth that we could perform magic. But I was determined that it wasn't the truth. Jason would probably have agreed. There was something that was wrong with our incantations... in how we pronounced, waved, gestured... none of us would accept the fact that we simply couldn't do magic.

Hey, I'm calling it a fact, the truth, like Jason and I can't do magic... Well, for now we couldn't. So what did we do? We kept on trying. Well, not quite yet. I'm still getting over Ben's sucsess, and Jason's still washing blood off, or out of, his face.