"Verona!" shrieked Lily, sitting upright with a start.
But Verona wasn't there. Neither was the train, the platform, or the man in the black cloak. Lily was sitting up in bed, clutching sheets to her chest, looking at white curtains that had been drawn around the little space she was in. The hospital wing. She was in the hospital wing? What had happened?
She'd gotten off the Hogwarts express with Verona. It had been raining, and they'd been heading for the carriages... the memories were weirdly out of focus, as though she were watching them through fogged glass. Everything had been quite normal, and then all of a sudden there was chaos; students were screaming, adults were shouting, and a man in a big, shapeless black cloak had pushed his way out of the crowd and pointed his wand at Lily. Verona had shouted and jumped between her friend and the attacker, there'd been a flash of green light...
... and then she was here.
The white curtains around the bed were whisked aside and there was Madame Pomphrey, with Professors McGonagall and Dumbledore behind her. All three stared at her a moment as if she were some kind of unspeakable monster, but then Madame Pomphrey bustled forward and began fluffing up Lily's pillow.
"Lie down, Miss Evans," she said, putting a hand on Lily's shoulder to push her gently back down onto the bed. "You've had quite an evening."
Lily didn't want to lie down. "What happened?" she asked.
"We're not quite sure, dear," said Madame Pomphrey, "but you're all right, and that's the important thing. Now, you lie down, and I'll..."
"Where's Verona?" asked Lily, remembering the green flash. That must have been a curse... it couldn't have been anything else. And Verona had jumped right into its path.
"Miss Ash is fine, Miss Evans," the mediwitch assured her, but Lily wasn't quite sure she believed it. At the end of the bed, Dumbledore and McGonagall were still standing there watching her as if afraid she might explode. "She's sleeping – I gave her a potion for it, and I'm going to give you one, too. You appear to be quite alive and whole, but I'd prefer to keep all four of you here overnight, just to be sure."
Lily blinked. "All four of us?"
Madame Pomphrey performed a summoning charm, and a cup and bottle of potion flew into her hands. "Yes, dear – you, Miss Ash, and two others. But you don't need to worry about that right now; you need to sleep. It's past midnight. Here you are." She held out the cup of potion.
"Where is Verona?" Lily asked, not taking it yet.
"In the next bed over," said Madame Pomphrey. "Here, you can see her." She pushed the curtain back and there, indeed, was Verona, lying on her back with her long black hair spilling over the pillow. Her eyes were shut and she was breathing peacefully. Verona didn't sleep like that. She'd slept over at Lily's house so many times... Verona slept on her stomach, and hummed in her sleep. She looked like a corpse lying there.
"There," Madame Pomphrey said. "Now, take your potion, Miss Evans. You need to sleep."
"All right." Lily reluctantly accepted the cup. The contents were warm, with a layer of froth on top, and tasted creamy and lemony. She drained it and gave it back to Madame Pomphrey.
"Much better," the mediwitch said with an approving nod, and without another word she pulled the curtains shut again, and three sets of footsteps walked away. Lily could hear soft voices through the wall as the adults stepped into Madame Pomphrey's office to talk.
Lily lay down and pulled the covers up. This potion must take a while to work, she thought, because she didn't feel sleepy yet. That was funny, really. Most of Madame Pomphrey's potions – and you could tell which ones were her own inventions because they actually tasted good – worked immediately, but here she was, wide awake and able to hear Verona breathing in the next bed.
She did not like the look she'd gotten at Verona. Maybe it was just the effect of the potion... but the too-peaceful sleep combined with the fact that Lily was almost sure her friend had taken a curse for her were deeply worrying. Maybe Verona was dead... or just not there anymore, the way people could get after being badly injured. If that were true, Madame Pomphrey definitely wouldn't tell Lily right away, not if Lily were hurt and needing to get better.
Lily knew she worried about Verona a lot – Verona herself had once said that Lily often sounded like her mother – but Verona needed to be worried about sometimes. When Lily had met her on the train, back in first year, Verona had been bright and eager, determined to be the best witch ever and join the ranks of legendary sorcerers her mother's family had produced. A few weeks of mockery at the hands of the Slytherins had quickly cured her of that. The other three girls in that year's Slytherin class – a set of triplets: Cissa, Bella, and Andy Black – were invariably cruel to her. They'd taken up the practice of laughing derisively at anything Verona said whether it was funny or not, until the poor girl had all but ceased to speak to anybody but Lily.
Lily herself, among the friendlier Gryffindors, was not such a target... but unlike Verona, she had no glorious ancestors to make her feel like she was capable of great things. All she had was a patent attorney father, a nurse mother, and a bossy older sister who considered her a freak. Lily's parents were proud of her, but they often seemed a little scared of her, too, as if afraid she'd turn them into frogs if they did something to annoy her. This meant she had much more freedom than her sister, and Petunia resented it horribly.
Nor did Lily have many friends at school. In first year she hadn't had any idea how to talk to the witches and wizards all around her. So many of them had been raised in an environment so different from her own. She'd made friends with Verona because Verona was also more or less Muggle-born... but by second year, when Lily had begun to gain some confidence, all the cliques were already formed, and none of them wanted new members. That left Lily and Verona alone, with no-one except each other.
Now Verona had stepped in between Lily and the curse that man had been about to cast at her... Lily buried her face in the pillow. She literally did not know what she would do if Verona were dead. She could not imagine attending a Hogwarts without Verona Ash in it. And on top of that, there was still something eerily wrong with her memory. She could remember all these things... but it was like remembering a dream, or something she'd seen in a movie. Lily knew that Verona was her friend whom she loved, but trying to call up actual images of anything before she'd awakened a few minutes ago was not working very well.
When was this bloody potion going to work? Lily would have loved to be able to fall asleep and forget about all this for a while. Maybe it wasn't taking effect because she was thinking too much about all these awful things... that tended to keep people awake, and perhaps it was powerful enough to counteract the potion. She ought to relax.
She wiggled around in bed, digging her body deeper into the mattress. Breathe deeply, she told herself, and realized suddenly that she was lying in exactly the same position as Verona had been. Maybe the potion wasn't working for Verona either, and she'd only been pretending or trying to go to sleep. Maybe if Lily sat up and called her friend's name again... but Madame Pomphrey might hear. She was, after all, just in the next room. Lily could still hear her talking, although the words were indistinct. She shut her eyes and tried to let the murmuring lull her to sleep.
But that didn't work either. In fact, the longer she lay there listening, the more the voices seemed to come into focus. Lily wasn't sure how far away Madame Pomphrey and the two professors were, but she could hear them as though they were standing next to her bed.
"It couldn't be a spell – nobody entered or left," the mediwitch was saying. "And necromancy only animates bodies, it can't revitalize them. It's as if the curses simply never touched them."
Despite the hospital wing's sheets, which were charmed to be as warm as blankets without being as heavy, Lily suddenly felt terribly cold. Who was Madame Pomphrey talking about? What about animated dead bodies? Was she saying Verona had become some kind of zombie? The idea was too utterly awful to contemplate.
"Well," said Professor Dumbledore. "It is plain that we will not reach any kind of solution to this tonight. All three of us are just as tired, if not more so, than those unfortunate young women, and tired minds can sometimes miss the obvious. I, for one, am going to bed."
"Me also," said Professor McGonagall, sounding as if she would like nothing better. "It feels like this afternoon was years ago."
It was nice to know Lily wasn't the only one who felt as if events earlier today had happened in another lifetime. Maybe it was just shock, and her memory would clear up given time.
"I'll check on the girls again, and then retire also," said Madame Pomphrey. "They'll probably be able to go to class tomorrow, believe it or not."
Lily shut her eyes and breathed evenly when the mediwitch checked in on her, and stayed that way after she'd gone. It seemed she was going to have to get to sleep on her own – the potion was definitely not doing its job. Lily's mother had told her once that the best way to get to sleep was to imagine steady, heavy rain, so she tried that, pretending she could hear it pattering on the roof and windows.
It actually began to work. She relaxed, and random mental pictures began drifting before her eyes – things that aren't quite dreams, but aren't quite conscious imaginings, either. There was a big oak tree, covered in autumn leaves, and...
Lily sat up again with a start; she'd remembered something else! After the green light, there'd been a flash of red... and it hadn't been cold like the green, but warm and comforting, like some big, kind, furry creature lifting her up and a voice telling her that she was safe and warm, and everything would be all right. And that memory wasn't like the earlier ones. It didn't feel like a dream... whatever had happened before it, the red light had been absolutely real.