Chapter 6

"Avada kedavra!"

Luna threw herself to the ground, passing narrowly under the green bolt of light, which flew just centimeters over her legs and hit the wall, shattering one of the stone blocks in the wall. "Expelliarmus!" shouted the other Slytherin boy. Luna's wand flew out of her hand as she reached for it, but she quickly jumped up.

"Accio wand!" she shouted, causing the flying wand to reverse course and return to her hand. She looked around; there were no teachers to intervene.

"Sectumsempra!" yelled the Slytherin prefect, slashing her wand at Luna.

Wordlessly, Luna used Protego to cast a bluish shield, reflecting the curse. The rebounding Sectumsempra ripped into its caster's chest, leaving a long gash from the Slytherin's right shoulder to her waist, along with a second cut diagonally across her face. She fell, her expression one of shock, as blood began to flow out of the ends of the gashes. Her two companions looked, horrified, at the fallen prefect, then turned with a renewed rage on Luna.

"Sectumsempra!" "Petrificus totalus!" each of them shouted a spell at the same time. Luna put up another shield, blocking the body-bind and the sword slash curse. The sword-slash curse bounced from her shield again, but this time the Slytherin boys both raised their own shields, sending the curse bouncing right back. Luna somersaulted aside as the Sectumsempra passed by and struck the stone wall, leaving behind two deep sword cuts in the stone.

"Slow her down!" one of the Slytherins whispered to the other. "You go first, I'll get her when she ducks!"

"Stupefy!" the other boy shouted. As they predicted, Luna dodged, and the red beam dissipated against the stone wall.

"Stop that!" A deep voice suddenly rang out from behind the Slytherins. The three fighting students looked up, startled. The voice belonged to the Minister of Magic himself, who had just emerged from a secret passage in the wall. Beside him was Draco Malfoy, the contractor of the attempted assassination.

"What's happened here?" Draco asked (though he knew the answer), pointing to the dying Slytherin girl. He pulled out his wand and cast a quick healing spell to stop the bleeding. As he said to the two boys, in an annoyed tone, "Get her to the Hospital Wing," he was surreptitiously raising the angle of his wand, to point further down the corridor towards Luna. The moment he finished the words "Hospital Wing", his next word was a spell: "Crucio!"

Draco's stratagem worked. The spell caught Luna off-guard, making her drop her wand and double over in pain. Scrimgeour pulled out his own wand. "Avada kedavra." As the green bolt impacted Luna's stomach, her body instantly stopped writhing, as her pain was over.

Now Scrimgeour quickly strode over to the dead girl, picked up her wand, and quietly performed a special incantation. Replacing the wand where it had dropped, he then did the same to the injured Slytherin's wand. Meanwhile, Draco turned around, pointing his wand at the two younger boys. "They will surely interrogate you two," he said. "Whatever they ask you, just say you don't remember what happened. Come this way," Draco pulled them down the hall and around a corner, out of sight of the casualties. Once they were around the corner, Draco leveled his wand again. "Obliviate!" The two boys had now forgotten Draco's presence. Before they could notice him again, he slipped into a secret passage, leaving the two Slytherins to innocently stumble upon their injured prefect.

"Malcolm, how did we get here?" one of them asked the other.

"I...I don't know!" Malcolm replied. "We were just eating lunch, weren't we?"

"Let's go back down to the Great Hall."

The two boys turned the corner, going for the nearest stairway they knew about.

"Oh my God who's that?"

"Are you all right?"

"Come on, we've got to get her to the Hospital Wing!"

"Levitate her!"

"Okay."

Taking no notice of the dead Ravenclaw in the corner, the two Slytherin students rushed their prefect to the Hospital Wing.

------September 8, 1998-------

Malcolm Baddock sat nervously in a chair in the Headmaster's office, with two Ministry Aurors flanking him.

"Now, Mr. Baddock," Dumbledore began, "As you know, two students were recently attacked near Ravenclaw Tower; one killed, the other seriously injured. As you discovered the wounded student and brought her to Madam Pomfrey, you must have been at the scene. Therefore, would you please shed some light on the incident?"

"I-I don't know what happened, sir," Malcolm answered honestly. The memory charm had indeed worked. "One moment I was with Graham at the Slytherin table. The next moment we were on the fourth floor around the corner from Ravenclaw Tower, with no idea how we got there. We turned the corner on our way back to the Great Hall and saw Elizabeth on the floor in a pool of blood. We rushed her to the Hospital Wing immediately."

"In that case, you never came into contact with her attacker?" Dumbledore clarified.

"We never saw him, sir."

As far as Malcolm was concerned, that was the truth, and Dumbledore, staring into his eyes with the piercing gaze of Legilimency, easily confirmed this.

"You say that you do not know how you arrived at the scene of the crime?" Dumbledore asked one last time, for confirmation.

"Yes."

"Very well. Mr. Baddock, it is clear that your memory has been erased. Most likely by the same person who attacked the other students. Reversal of Memory Charms is always uncertain, but it is our best chance at this time. You will report to the Hospital Wing with your friend at seven o'clock tonight. For now you are dismissed."


The wizarding community of Britain was only mildly surprised when news of the Hogwarts attack broke. The violence itself was quite expected; Luna Lovegood was well known for her role in fighting Voldemort, and now as the daughter of a pro-Potter magazine editor, both roles that had made her some powerful enemies. However, few people had expected the violence to occur at Hogwarts, one of the safest places in the world since Voldemort's death.

The Ministry's investigation pointed hard at Bellatrix Lestrange, the most devoted of the Death Eaters. A team of six Aurors hand-picked by Minister Scrimgeour discovered Lestrange's safe house and arrested her after an hourlong duel. Lestrange's wand was traced to the spells that had been used against the two Hogwarts students, and she was happy to confess to the attacks before the Wizengamot. The net effect of this episode was to improve Scrimgeour's standing in the polls. Under him, the Ministry had brought a wanted Death Eater to justice and, moreover, had properly handled a case involving the murder of a political challenger's close friend.

Dumbledore knew better. Investigating for himself, he noticed that Luna's and Elizabeth's wands had been tampered with, and he knew that Malcolm Baddock and Graham Pritchard had been forced to attempt the assassination, then Obliviated when they had failed. Lestrange, he suspected (correctly), was in cahoots with the Scrimgeour campaign, taking the blame and the Azkaban sentence to get Scrimgeour reelected in exchange for who knew what. Whatever she was getting in exchange, it couldn't be good...

Mark Lovegood, now all alone in the world, was distraught for only a few days. His mood, however, brightened up considerably the day after his daughter's funeral; he began to speak of her as if she were still alive, but merely confined to their home. The Order members assumed that he was insane, but still accepted him, and he continued to provide the most reliable statistics available to the Potter campaign. He wrote in the Quibbler, with quite sound analysis, that "this election is shaping up to be a contest between rich and poor, dark and light, perpetrators and victims..."

-------October 1, 1998------

From the October edition of The Quibbler:

POLL RESULTS FOR WEEK OF SEPT. 23-30

Poll taken of 200 wizarding households in Britain by floo, owl post, and face-to-face from 9/26-9/29; sample includes 582 eligible voters in a representative cross-section of Britain magical population. Margin of error is plus or minus 4.1 percentage points.

This is the first poll that will include Dementors, who as of Sept. 18are now eligible to vote under Ministry Decree #2672, paragraph 1b.

Question 1. What type of being are you?

Percentage of respondents that answered:

Human, non-Werewolf - 58.4

Dementor - 25.7

Goblin - 7.0

Vampire - 2.3

Werewolf - 1.8

Other / Mixed ancestry - 4.8

Question 2. What is your blood purity?

Pureblood - 31.0

Half-blood - 45.8

Muggle-born - 19.4

Half-breed - 4.8

Question 3. What is your income level?

Less than 500 Galleons annually - 4.0

500 to 700 Galleons - 19.5

700 to 1000 Galleons - 20.4

1000 to 1500 Galleons - 16.8

1500 to 3000 Galleons - 9.9

Over 3000 Galleons - 0.7

Unemployed / No income - 28.7

Question 4. Are you now or were you ever a supporter of the Dark Lord?

Yes, willingly - 30.7

Yes, under blackmail - 6.4

No - 62.9

Question 5. If the election were held today, who would you vote for Minister?

Rufus Scrimgeour - 43.1

Harry Potter - 30.2

Undecided / Don't know - 26.7