"That's not how you use a shield spell!" Fred exclaimed from the floor.

"Oh?" I asked casually.

Running toward him and smashing him with it had been fairly effective, but I suspected that it had only worked because he hadn't been ready for it. I'd felt feedback when I'd hit him, which meant that my size and weight were a limitation.

He rose to his feet.

"A wizard who has to get close to someone is a Wizard who's dead," he said. "Everybody knows that. You'd know that too if you weren't a crazy troll killing muggle."

I shrugged.

Working on shield charms was a major step forward in my evolution as a witch. I was still trying to work out creative ways to use shields, though. What if you could do more than just make a barrier in front of you?

Put a shield around someone's head, and not only could you suffocate them, you could prevent them from speaking spells. You could even fill the shield with something terrifying, like bees, and they wouldn't be able to get rid of them.

If you put shields around their hands, would they be able to gesture with wands?

I was still uncertain whether shields could be moved or shaped; I was still learning the basics. It was something I fully intended to find out, though.

"Can you reshape the shields?" I asked.

Asking a third year might not be the best option, but if something was common knowledge no point in doing a lot of research I didn't have to.

"What do you mean?" Fred asked.

"Change it from this basic shape to something else?"

He stared at me for a moment. We'd been working with each other for a few weeks now, and he likely knew that I never asked a question without having a reason behind it.

"Why would you want to?"

"Well, for one thing, have you heard of muggle tanks?"

The Weasley twins were purebloods, but their father was some government official who dealt with muggle artifacts. That meant they were a little more familiar with technology than some of the other students, although I was still astonished by their ignorance sometimes.

He frowned. "Those things that have water in them?"

"Yes, but there's another kind of tank... an armored vehicle, alike an automobile," I said.

I knew their father had one of those. I'd overheard the youngest Weasley bragging about it, right before Draco had made fun of him for it.

"Armored?"

"Think of a turtle, except with a shell made out of thick metal," I said.

He nodded slowly.

"Well, eventually they discovered that having armor straight up and down made it relatively easy to break through. But sloping the armor made it a lot tougher."

"Why?"

"If something hits sloped armor at an angle, there's a chance that it might bounce off, or be deflected," I said. "There's other reasons; you can get more armor for less weight or something, but it's kind of complicated."

"Attacks already bounce off shields," he said.

"But what if you could change the shape so that the spell bounces right back to the caster?" I asked.

He froze for a moment. "That would be a huge advantage... but there's no way to know what shape could do that. People are going to be attacking you from all kinds of angles, and in the heat of battle you aren't going to be able to figure out the exact shape that you need."

"But if you could," I said. "The shape could be changed?"

"Maybe..." he said. "I'd have to do some research."

"What about putting a shield on someone else?" I asked. "Like if one of you wanted to protect Ron?"

He frowned. "Without being in front of him? That's something I'd have to look up too."

"You could even use that for a prank," I said. "If you could make the shield hard to see."

"How?" he asked.

"Put a shield in front of someone's feet... a small one, and they'd trip."

"There's already a tripping jinx."

"But if they check you wand, what would they find?" I asked. I lowered my voice in a weird approximation of his."Oh, no, Professor, I didn't cast a tripping jinx. You can check my wand."

He looked thoughtful. "I can see how that might be useful. There's probably other things you could do with it."

"Turn a shield into a sphere and fill it with water," I said. "Or something funnier...I'm not really good at pranking people. Then dismiss the sphere when they walk under it."

He stared at me searchingly. "Why do I get the impression that you don't want to know this for pranks?"

I shrugged. "Maybe I'm getting a sense of humor."

He smirked. "I'll believe that when I see it."

"What about a reverse bubbleheaded charm?" I asked. "One that would keep smalls in instead of out? That's make those stink bombs of yours a lot more effective."

It would also be perfect for more dangerous gasses... and it would be something that they'd be unlikely to dispel because they were gagging and their eyes watering.

"It sounds like a lot of work for me and George," Fred said thoughtfully. "But you aren't wrong. I think people would rather have a specific spell for something because it usually works better, but for pranks, you might be right. Doing things people don't expect is key."

"Like hitting someone with a shield charm?" I asked sweetly.

"That wouldn't have worked if I was ready for it," he said irritably. He grabbed a towel and wiped his neck.

"I wouldn't have done it if you were."

He was silent for a moment. "Are you going to the Halloween Feast?"

"A girl's gotta eat," I said.

"Dumbledore is going all out this year," he said. "There's supposed to be dancing skeletons. I heard that he was going to wait until next year, but he's changed his mind."

He was probably trying to distract everyone. I'd overheard some of the students talking about letters from their parents. Everyone seemed worried, even the Slytherin parents, and many of the students had been told to keep their heads down and not make waves.

The older students seemed to be taking this reasonably well, but it was frightening the First and Second year students.

I wiped my own forehead with my towel. Wizarding combat involved a lot of running around, at least the way I did it. It wasn't as good as endurance running; I had considered asking Snape if I could have a treadmill delivered by owl, but I wasn't sure where I'd put it, and the last thing I ended was to have an object that I used all the time, a perfect target for curses.

In the past few weeks since the troll attack there hadn't been any more attacks on me. No one was particularly friendly with me either, other than my core group of acquaintances. The Quidditch team did seem to treat me with a modicum of respect, more than than they did the other first years anyway.

"This has been good for me and George," Fred said. "We're getting faster, and it's good to practice with someone other than each other, even if it's just a group of firsties. It'll be good for the next time things get heated."

The school had managed to quiet the open battles in the halls, but there was a simmering tension that hadn't gone away. People were afraid, and in my experience, that fear was easy to turn to anger.

I was having them practice with me, Hermione, Mildred and Neville, although I was having extra sessions the others didn't know about.

"I'm glad you decided to work with us," I said. "And that you aren't just the jerks the Slytherins think you are."

"All the Slytherins?" he asked.

I nodded solemnly.

He grinned and threw his towel at me. I dodged it. "That just means we're doing our jobs right. The Weaseleys are the bane of the Slytherins."

"Draco certainly seems to think that about your brother," I said.

Draco had been maturing nicely, although he still had times when bits of his former self showed through. This occurred most often around the youngest Weasley boy, although he seemed irritated occasionally by Harry Potter.

"We all think that about Ron," Fred said. "But that's brothers for you. You can't live with them."

I waited for the rest of the phrase and he just grinned at me.

"You should have some fun at the party," he continued. "After all, you're half monster yourself."

I bared my teeth at him, and he laughed.

He flicked his wand, and muttered and his towel went into his bag. "I'll see you on Wednesday."

With that, he was gone. I waited in the room for several minutes after he left. While I could tell if there were people watching, portraits were harder, and they tended to gossip. The last thing that I needed was for rumors to spread about what I was doing with an older boy, especially a Gryffindor.

I'd chosen a hallway that didn't have any portraits, but there were always wandering ghosts, and Peeves would be delighted in spreading nasty rumors, especially since he thought there was nothing I could do to him.

With my luck, they'd think that I was drinking his blood. The rumors that I was a vampire hadn't gone away, and there were even some people claiming that I was Snape's illegitimate daughter.

The weird thing was that I couldn't absolutely rule that out, because I didn't know a lot about my host bodies' family life. I could say that there wasn't much of a physical resemblance between us.

Maybe it was because we were both considered intimidating. I'd noticed that Snape purposefully worked at being intimidating, although it had never worked on me.

After facing Jack Slash, the Siberian and Scion, very little was actually intimidating.

As I stepped out into the hallway, I heard the sounds of weeping coming from one of the bathrooms. It was the one that seemed never to be used by any of the girls, even though I'd used it a couple of times.

Stepping cautiously inside, I said, "Myrtle?"

I was at least passingly familiar with most of the ghosts in the school. I had been paranoid enough about them that I had needed that information. After all, they were harder to watch out for than people, who my bugs could sense easily, or portraits, who were limited to one place.

The sobbing noise from the bathroom stopped.

"Go away!" I heard a voice echo from within a stall.

"All right," I said, shrugging. There was no point in going where I wasn't wanted, and I wasn't an expert in ghost psychology, especially as from everything I had read, they weren't actually the spirits of the dead, but instead were imprints, or copies of those spirits.

They were like magical portraits in a way; they couldn't experience physical pleasure, and their abilities to learn from new experiences were limited; that was part of what made Binns such a terrible teacher, although I suspected that he'd never been a particularly brilliant one.

The room was cold; even colder than the rest of the castle. I'd read that was something that tended to happen in the presence of ghosts, and it might be a way to detect them. My insects could sense cold, after all, even if a ghost was hiding.

The ability to see them at all was a Wizarding trait; muggles would have only felt a sense of discomfort, or coldness, or a shadow out of the corner of their eye. It was enough to make me wonder if there had been ghosts in my old world; most likely not because they were only generated from Wizards.

Some of the worst Pureblood bigots liked to speculate that this was because Muggles didn't have souls. Not all purebloods felt this way, but a few did.

"You don't want to know what's wrong?" she asked.

"You were murdered and are angry about it?" I asked.

I saw her head poke out of the bathroom stall and she glared at me. "That's just what I'd expect from a Slytherin... making assumptions about people."

"Oh?" I asked. "So I'm wrong?"

"Yes!" she said. She didn't elucidate, though, staring at me as though she was waiting for some kind of response.

"Well, I've got to get going," I said. "I hope you get over whatever is bothering you... and the dying of course."

I didn't tell her that I'd been dead before, so I could sympathize. That was the kind of thing that could easily get me dead again, or maybe worse. I'd heard about the Dementors. It took a cruel kind of society to make the death penalty the kinder option.

Having your soul sucked out, and all hopes of an afterlife snuffed, that was truly disturbing; I hadn't even known there was proof there was an afterlife. That was a piece of information that would have set all of humanity back on its respective rumps and made them question everything.

The Wizards didn't seem to know what that afterlife was; like the ghosts, it wasn't a question I could answer either. Maybe this was my afterlife and if so, I had a feeling that I wasn't in the good place. Purgatory maybe?

"None of the ghosts want me to go to the party on Halloween," she said.

"The party with the dancing skeletons?" I asked. "Isn't everyone going to that?"

"No! The afterparty... it's for ghosts and guests, a celebration of our collective Death's day. Halloween is supposed to be the day we're closest to being alive again, and we like to celebrate it."

"Weren't you invited to last year's party?" I asked.

"Yes," she said sulkily. "And that's why I'm not invited this year."

She started to cry again.

I could see why even ghosts might be reluctant to have her around; her constant complaining and crying would get on anyone's nerves. However, I could remember crying in a bathroom myself because of what others were doing.

Could ghosts be bullied? Were they even truly sentient, or were they simply simulacra?

Did it matter?

Getting them on my side would increase my influence by a great deal. My biggest limitation currently, other than my size and lack of magical ability was the fact that I could only concentrate on one thing at a time. That meant that it was inevitable that sooner or later I was going to miss something.

"Well," I said slowly. "You need to ask yourself what it would take for you to get invited. Or you need to crash the party."

"Crash...?"

"Show up without being invited. If you are good, people might not say anything. If you are bad, they'll chuck you out, but at least you'll have tried."

She frowned. "I couldn't do that... not by myself."

"Are you asking me to go to the party with you?" I asked. "Uninvited to a ghost party as your plus one?"

"Plus one...?" she asked. Finally she nodded. "That would be great!"

"And it's after the regular party?" I asked.

"The Bloody Baron didn't want to miss the Dancing Skeletons," she said. "He's invited them to the after party too, but nobody knows if they're going to show up."

"I'll have to get permission from professor Snape," I said. "Because it'll likely involve me being out after hours, but I'll go with you if I can."

She smiled, and what had been a very plain girl was suddenly just a little less plain.

Her smile vanished almost as quickly as it had come, like a summer rain shower. She started sobbing again.

"What is it now?" I asked.

"I wouldn't have to be bothering with all of this if I hadn't been murdered."

"Right," I said. "I'll be going now."

"You'll be there, won't you?" she asked, sounding suddenly insecure.

"I do what I promise," I said. "Good or bad. Whether I'll come back next year depends on how badly you embarrass me and how angry you make the other ghosts."

"Embarrass you?" she asked.

"We can talk about what happened last year, and how you can avoid offending the others tomorrow after dinner," I said. "I've got something I have to do right now."

She hesitated, then nodded.

I sighed and headed out of the bathroom. Turning this into a win was going to be difficult, especially if Myrtle made it harder for me with the other ghosts. Yet she was trapped here, and being trapped in school for all of eternity was my definition of hell.

I needed to go to the library to look something called Boggarts up; apparently Travers was going to have us face one tomorrow. We were going to be the first class that had seen one, and so I had no lead time from the rumors and conversations of the other classes.

Was that deliberate? Was there something about this monster that would give Travers some kind of an advantage?

I hadn't forgotten that one of my goals was to find out who was doing the killing of the muggleborn, and just as importantly, who it was in the school that had given out all the names.

It had to be a staff member because students had not been present at school when the letters were mailed out. However, I couldn't make the mistake of assuming that it had to be a human staff member.

The house elves pretended to be all nice and subservient, but sometimes I wondered if there was hatred in their eyes. After all, they were slaves, and of course slaves were going to pretend to love slavery. How they really felt might be a different matter... or it might not. I wasn't discounting them though.

Even Mrs. Norris was a suspect; if McGonagall could turn into a cat, who was to say that some of the other pets in the castle weren't actually people too? She certainly liked to snoop around enough.

For some reason, I felt an underlying sense of dread about tomorrow.