My head was bent over the parchment in front of me. I was about three questions from the pain of sixth year being over but I was stumped. Just stumped.

Name the three Unforgivable Curses and explain what they each do to the victim.

Crucio, Avada Kedavra and… And… Merlin, I could never bloody remember this one! I lifted my head and looked around. Remus was scribbling away, Petter was chewing on his quill and Sirius was leaning casually back in his seat, hair falling into his eyes. Like usual. He grinned at me. His swollen eye was slowly fading and his face looked almost normal. He still had the girls swooning over him. Just a glance around the room showed me three girls with their eyes locked on my best mate. I shook my head and stared down at my parchment, struggling to think clearly.

No good.

Bloody Evans. She'd played us for a bunch of fools. She'd just gone ahead and screwed with us. All of us. Susan had figured it out and told Sirius the day after I gave his face some colour. I couldn't get the idea that I'd been sucked in by that stupid bitch out of my head. Resting my forehead in my hand, I bit my lip and let the thoughts swish around inside my head.

'Money,' Sirius had said to me, just the other day. 'It's always money.' He shook his head, looking at me pityingly. 'Susan told me that she was sucking up to you to pretty much feed off you. To use you. Us. All of us… she's been stealing from us. Not just money, but ideas. Susan said she has high plans for herself and she's been using people to gain influence and to steal ideas for years.'

I'd looked at him, disbelieving. 'You believe that?'

He had ticked off his fingers. 'She suddenly becomes best mates with us, she keeps our map, she helped us with our essays, going through our books… our books, James.' He looked at me intently and my heart sank. The notes… in the margin… the old spells, the tips for becoming Animagi… the hints that Remus… And I then suddenly remembered small things… very small things that had meant nothing to me at the time.

'Can I borrow a galleon?'

'Where are you going for Christmas?'

'Mind if I borrow your book?'

'Why did you write that..?'

'Wow, how much money do you have?'

'No…'

'James?'

I had looked up at him and he shook his head sadly. 'James, you might want to check your trunk. I think something might be missing.'

He had been right. My cloak. My invisibility cloak. And half of my money. I stared up at Sirius.

'Let's wait until after our exams.'

Now here I was, poised on the verge of stuffing up my exam purely because Lily Evans had, yet again, pissed me off. She seemed to have developed a talent at that. I should have continued that plot to make her into a mini Medusa.

But what got to me, what really peeved me off, was the fact that she'd gone through my stuff and taken my cloak. Stolen it. My father gave it to me and I was waiting until after my bloody exams to get back my inheritance. I was planning on handing that to my own son and now it was sitting in the bottom of the trunk of a thief.

Furiously, I scribbled on my parchment.

Imperius.

Sirius and I were standing at the foot of the steps to the girls dormitory. Both of us had our brooms behind us, out of sight on the couch. We knew Lily would come down soon and our faces were blank, carefully impersonal. My heart had resided somewhere in the region of my stomache and a voice was niggling in the back of my mind. I had a strange sense that she was innocent, that she had done nothing wrong… but what about all the stuff that was missing? It wasn't just mine. Then again, that voice nudged my mind again, why was she looking so miserable...? I shook my head. This was too confusing, Confront, and let it be over with.

A door slammed somewhere above our heads and light footsteps pattered down the stone stairs. A little girl in a dark dress appeared… a little girl who was really sixteen. With riveting green eyes and long, dark red hair.

'James…? Sirius…?' Lily stopped a few steps higher than us, her face pale. 'What's wrong?'

I looked directly into her eyes. 'I want my stuff back. So do the rest of us. Now.'