A/N: My computer has kind of died (the motherboard is slowly melting. It's not pretty), so i've had most of this chapter ready for a while, but here we are!
Chapter 39: Return of the Magi (haha)
Hermione had worn a frown whilst I was explaining what happened last night. A perfect tale to tell over breakfast. She hadn't known who Barty Jr was, but promised to look into it later, more for her own desire than to clue me in. The news that Peter was, once more, on the scene here has drawn out a mixed reaction.
"On the one hand it's worrying." She says, talking quietly as to not be heard despite nobody sitting near us right now. "The attack on the world cup and now this? But also it could mean he could be caught, which is good, isn't it?"
"It would make me feel a bit better." I agree. "Sirius too." I watch as the first owls trickle into the hall.
"Must you go to Azkaban though?" Hermione asks anxiously.
"Nobody else'll be able to figure anything else out." I shrug. "What's the worst that could happen?" I snatch the falling Daily Prophet from the air, she rolls her eyes.
"Show off. And you could be kissed!" She hisses.
"Was that an offer?" I hold the paper out across the table for her. She rolls her eyes again and swipes the paper from my hand. "Your eyes will roll out of your head if you keep doing that. I hear that's what happened to Moody." I tap just below my eye-patch.
"Professor Moody." She corrects me, unrolling the newspaper. "Where is Hedwig today?"
"Up in the owlery." Why can't the Prefects hand out our timetables earlier?
"Is that a joke?"
"No, she really is." I assure her, waiting for the opportune moment to tell her what she's doing there. Hermione lifts her drink. "She can see a couple of seventh year girls sucking face up there." Hermione, predictably, spits and coughs the pumpkin juice onto the paper.
"W-what!?" She chokes out.
"She likes to be an owl still, quite what she's doing in the owlery is beyond me." I shrug. Something brushes up against my leg, a cat. I watch as the brown tabby wanders under the bench again, which reminds me... "Where's Crookshanks?" Hermione dabs the pumpkin juice from the paper and points down the table. The ball of orange fur is sprawled out at the far end of the Gryffindor table beside Ginny, who is scratching his soft underbelly, much his delight apparently. "Ah, so he's moved onto his newest fixation?" Early in our third year, up until around Christmas time maybe, Crookshanks would pester me at breakfast to be petted and often followed me around in my nightly travels under my cloak. "So... Why's your familiar getting so cosy with Ginny? Something you wanna tell me?" I say teasingly. Or I meant to. Hermione tenses. "Unless..." I look down the table. Loves Quidditch, age gap. "It's her, isn't it?!" I whisper excitedly. "Oh, I'm so stupid! I was thinking it was one of the twins or Cedric. That's why you were all dressed up that day in the summer?"
"Harry!" She squeaks. "Don't tell her!"
"Come on, Hermione, give me some credit. I've told you secrets that could endanger your life if you weren't practising occlumency, you can trust me with this." She looks relieved.
"Sorry." She sighs. "I should've told you."
"Nah." I wave her off. "It's not my business if you want to crawl into Ginny's bed or not." Hermione's face is now flushed red.
"It's not like that!" She denies, confirming my suspicions. "Hedwig isn't telling the truth!"
"I actually got this myself." I smile. "When did you tease her about it?" I ask Hedwig.
"When we all went shopping. Oh, and it's about time! I got it weeks ago!" She tells me smugly.
"Hedwig can hold back things from me, much like I do to save her the mental bombardment." I wiggle my fingers, the secret sign for 'psychometry stuff'.
"This is the most exhausting conversation I've ever had." Hermione drops her head into her arms. I bite back a laugh.
"It's not easy being this energetic." I pat her arm.
"I hate you." She shifts her head so she can glare at me.
"Thanks, it means a lot to me. Oh, look sharp – Your girlfriend is coming over." I have to snatch my hand back to save it from being stabbed with a fork as Hermione growls at me.
"Woah, What's he done to deserve that?" Ginny asks, as she slides into the spot beside Hermione.
"Nothing." Hermione angrily reads the paper again.
"Totally innocent." I grin, slipping my bag over my shoulder. Looks like I'll have to collect my own timetable. I wouldn't put it past the others to not give it to me on purpose. "I'll see you two later. Can't be a Ravenclaw and not turn up early on the first day." I retrieve my walking stick and swing my legs over the bench.
It's an odd life.
"Busy first day?" I ask Albus as we sit in his office.
"No more than average." He stirs his tea a couple of times before the spoons takes over for him. "We still have just shy of two months before the tournament begins, then I may need Severus to bring me a headache potion each night." I grin and set my feet on his desk.
"Maybe make it two, an extra so you can deal with the headache that talking to him seems to bring." Albus doesn't look impressed. "The Prophet said that there will be French Aurors here too, is that true?"
"I am afraid so." Albus sighs, taking a sip from his mug. "Cornelius was giving quite an earful when he tried to assure the French Auror department that it was unnecessary, but they were adamant that, after the World Cup, that more security couldn't go amiss."
"And he didn't take it well?"
"As the discussion began to heat up, I had the misfortune of being spotted in my hiding place behind a potted plant." He sighs. I have to bite back a laugh at the thought of Albus hiding behind a potted plant. "Threats were made to escalate the request to 'my level' and so Cornelius agreed, for the good of the children. He may do something rash to 'prove' something."
"He should've just accepted the help instead of looking like an idiot. Tonks said they'd be spread thin enough to get proper coverage by themselves. That was ages ago, however. Erm... You don't think Fudge would send dementors here, do you?"
"I would not discount the possibility." He frowns.
"I could scare them off." I offer. "If you did it, you'd get into trouble, but if I did it, then it'd just be a schoolboy trying not to get his soul eaten, right?"
"Harry..." He pinches the bridge of his nose tiredly. I hold my palms up.
"I didn't say I was going to, but if they come here, just give me a subtle nod or something." I say innocently.
"Be aware that there may be laws against attacking them." He resigns himself to leaning back in his chair, trying his best not to smile.
"I'll just have to goad one of them and have Moody happen to be out for a stroll to spot me being attacked, then it's self defence." I shrug.
"The perfect plan." He shakes his head as he chuckles. "Have you any further plans for the night? I suspect you will want to be in top form tomorrow morning." He smiles at me over his half-moon glasses. Double potions first thing in the morning. Although he poses this as a question, it's just his way of saying 'Go straight back to your room'.
"I've not been in the Forbidden Forest for the whole summer! Of course I've still got things to do tonight." I jump up from my chair.
"Short of tying you to your bed, I cannot stop you from breaking the rules, but you should do well to remember that you are not above them, Harry." He says seriously.
"Detention tomorrow night then?" I lean against the door frame to his office.
"I believe Minerva has no engagements. Let us say seven o'clock sharp?"
"Not Snape?"
"I see no reason to punish Severus with your presence." He jokes, picking up his quill.
"Night, Albus!" I call out as I descend the spiral stairs.
In my latest expedition into the Forbidden Forest, I have ascertained that it is not walking stick friendly terrain. Being a wolf in the forest is fine, but a human with a walking stick is much less fun. I'm mostly OK without it now, but with the uneven flooring it's better to have something to lean on that isn't a tree. What am I really doing out here? Trying to find a dementor ambush point. Short of actually saying 'Fudge will post dementors at Hogwarts', Albus couldn't have been more obvious that it will happen. The Minister doesn't like being made to look like an incompetent fool, which is odd as he is an incompetent fool, so bringing in the 'big guns' after the French Ministry have offered their help will, in his mind, make him look clever and powerful.
If I do find myself under attack from a dementor or two, and I can't produce a patronus at all, then my contingency plan is to, heroically, run away into the forest. Zaldimar, the betrayer of the pixies, devised a magical trap so complex and powerful that he could trap a pixie attempting to shift into the fourth dimension, so I assume that it can, at the very least, slow a dementor down. I need to find a nice open area to set it up though. A body of water will also allow me to lift the water into the air and try and freeze them in place should all else fail.
After another five minutes of slow, cautious walking, and no doubt being followed, I find a pond about twenty feet across. Large thick trees around the outside will serve perfectly as the pillars for trap. I pop my trusty holly wand from it's holster and set to work. There is a large chance that all of this will be for nothing. No dementors, no chase, but I like to practice things sometimes. Sitting in Salazar's chamber for hours on end, pondering the theory just isn't the same. The trees in the Forbidden Forest probably drink up all the magically infused nutrients from the Earth, more specifically the ley lines, making them perfect candidates for anchored spells. This kind of spell casting isn't very flashy as it's just pressing the spells into the trees, although I could use runes for this, but I don't have years to work the spell out and create the structure, nor do I have the years of experience that Zaldimar had in the subject. Not the finer points anyway.
I step back from the tree and hear a crack behind me just as I am about to stow my wand which causes me to whirl round and raise my wand. For a reasonably adept duellist, my situational awareness is pretty poor. A girl, maybe twelve or thirteen years old, appears to have tripped over a tree's root in an attempt to back away from me. My wand vanishes back into the holster as I clear space between us, luckily the moonlight illuminates the area enough for me not to drop my walking stick into a magical badger hole or something. I crouch down beside her, trying not to look as frightening as she seems to see me.
"What are you doing out here?" I ask her. She looks familiar. Slytherin robes, black hair, red irises, and an odd poisonous, flowery scent that probably isn't perfume. She doesn't answer. What's her name? F-something. Maybe Venice? Florence! That's it. "You're Florence, right?" She looks surprised, but nods. "You're not mute, are you?"
"N-no." She stutters. I stand up and offer her a hand up. She brushes the mud off of her robes. Her hand is cold, but more like stone than ice. She is, of course, a vampire.
"So, why are you out here? Students aren't supposed to be in the forest." I rest both of my hands on the handle of my walking stick.
"I got lost." She mumbles, looking down at her feet.
"You didn't get lost and end up in the forest, you got lost as a result of coming out here." She doesn't say anything. "Fine then." I sigh. "I'm heading back to the castle now, and I'm not lost, so if you want to come back too..." She nods eagerly, looking up at me again. "Alright then. Just walk on my left, if we're attacked I want my casting hand not being blocked." She looks worried again. If we're going to be attacked by anything, she's the one with tougher skin.
"What were you doing to the trees?" She asks after we walk for a few minutes. So now she talks.
"Just setting a trap." I explain vaguely. "One can never be too careful." Especially when a person's soul is in danger of being eaten.
"For what?"
"Something unpleasant. You're a Sanguini, right? Maximus' sister?" The Sanguini Coven, or however they like to be referred to, are a 'family' of vampires that age to somewhere between 14 and their mid 20s then stop. They are fertile, which sets them apart from some of the other families, which means that they are not bitten to be turned. The family is supposed to be quite friendly… for vampires.
"How did you know?" She looks more shocked than scared now.
"A wild guess."
"Did you know Max?" Maximus, or 'Max', left after my second year.
"I never really had much interaction with him." He always seemed quite lively from what I've seen when sitting in chairs that he has or walking where he'd been. It doesn't take long to reach the edge of the forest. "So, you're not going to tell Snape you saw me out here tonight, and I won't tell him that I saw you out here either. Agreed?" She nods, smiling enough to show her teeth. Not how I expected my walk back from the forest to go, but at least she didn't try to drink my blood. "Wait, you weren't out here to eat, were you?" Her smiles turns more smirk-like before she turns and runs towards the castle.
I hope ever night isn't this exciting, I think I've had my fill already. Maybe I should put up some wallpaper in the Chamber of Secrets to make it more homely.
A/N: Harry and Albus banter, Harry figures out Hermione's crush, and Harry meets a new person. All in a day's work.
The 'Fantastic Beasts and Where to find Them' second teaser came out today. I'm excited and might worm Newton Scamander into the story at some point, who knows?
Let me know what you think of this one and, as ever, Enjoy!