I woke to find myself on the floor ten feet away from the tub, hacking and gagging water. There was a severed and dismembered arm that looked rather familiar. It was a child's arm, and it was female.

My hands were still shaking from adrenaline, so it couldn't have been that long since I had fallen unconscious.

There was a pool of blood spreading out on the floor by the bathtub. An ever growing swarm of insects was covering what should have been a body; however, in the few gaps that existed in the cover, there was nothing there.

What had happened? The last thing I remembered was being held under the water, needing desperately to get away.

Was it my accidental magic again? Or had someone saved me while I was out?

The insects couldn't tell me; I couldn't delve into their memories, only their senses right now. There were no footprints in the water that now covered the floor other than those of my attacker, and there was no evidence that I'd been dragged out of the water. It looked as though I'd been there, and then suddenly I was here, along with a good bit of the water in the tub and part of my attacker.

Was this apparation? I thought that didn't work in Hogawarts.

Maybe it was some other kind of movement, or maybe accidental magic wasn't covered by the wards. I'd heard that House elves could teleport here, presumably by using some kind of more primal magic.

As I staggered to my feet, I had my bugs check the body; it seemed to be growing cold, and there was no sign of a heartbeat or breathing. Along with the blood loss from being dismembered, there was all the poison flowing through her veins.

She was as small as me, at least in height, although her hands had been as strong as an adult man.

I staggered over to the mirror, and there was a line of bruises around my throat, bruises that were going to be hard to conceal without muggle makeup.

Glancing back at the body, I saw that it was shimmering. I called the insects back, and I stared at the remains in front of me.

Mildre...no...Millicent was lying on the floor, her eyes staring upward sightlessly.

I felt my stomach drop.

I'd saved her from bullies, and in return she'd been one of my supporters through all of this. This wasn't something she'd done on her own; whatever strange smell she was exusing was probably because of a potion of some sort.

Someone had turned my own min...serv...friend against me, and they'd done it deliberately. They'd wanted me to kill my own ally to send me a message; they could get to me at any time, and if they couldn't they'd be able to reach my friends.

A vein in my forehead throbbed, and my fists tightened. They'd tried to kill me for no other reason than because I was alive, and now they'd killed someone I valued. There had been a lot of times in the pat where I'd channeled fear into anger, at least according to Doctor Yamada, but this time felt justified.

They needed to die.

It had always been on the horizon, something that I'd tried not to think about, but ultimately I'd always known that eventually I was going to have to kill Voldemort and all the Death Eaters. It had never been a question of if, but of when.

That when had just gotten a lot shorter.

As my senses expanded, I noticed something strange.

My bug senses had expended by a factor of two again, and there were two people lying in bed in our bedroom. One of them was almost certainly Millie.

So who was this?

The form shimmered and grew longer, into a form that was almost as recognizable.

Filch, the janitor. His sightless dead eyes were staring up at me, accusingly, almost as though he'd expected some other outcome from his attempted murder.

He was a Squib, and he wouldn't have had any defense against mind control. He'd have had access to the lists, but probably not much more than a glance. He'd have been able to enter and leave the castle even after Dumbledore improved the defenses.

Why take the form of Millie?

The stairs...most likely Snape had limited access to the girl's stairs and he hadn't been on the list. Someone had put him under the invisibility and silence spells and then commanded him to drink the potion before coming up here to murder me.

Those potions weren't any joke to make; they took at least a month to brew and some part of the person to be turned into...usually hair. As janitor, Filch would have had access to stray hairs from all over the school; it might have been random chance that he'd gotten hairs from Millie.

Or it might have been deliberate. Whoever had done this may have wanted me to think that I'd been betrayed and that I was going to die alone.

A quick sniff showed that he still smelled of alcohol, along with the inevitable smells of death. I couldn't detect the other, strange smell, but my bugs could. Most likely it was something about the polyjuice potion itself that they were cluing in on.

Had Filch left for Hogsmeade last night to celebrate Halloween? It would explain the alcohol smell, and it would have given his master a chance to give him his orders.

There was only one suspect that made any sense for all of this.

Avery.

He was one of the Death Eaters who'd murdered my family, and he was the uncle of the boy I'd put in the hospital. I'd done it in the bathtub, and so killing me in the bathtub would not only be poetic justice, it would send a message to the non-purebloods in school that no one would get away with hurting a pureblood.

If it was done in a way that looked like an accident, then all the better. After all, I'd gotten away with dousing his nephew in the boil potion, so that would prove that even the aurors couldn't protect them. They'd probably spread word to the Slytherins in some kind of low key way.

The time to brew the potion was probably the only reason he'd waited this long. He might have been waiting for Filch on the grounds; when he saw me he'd taken his chance. Undoubtedly he'd been disillusioned already during the attack. He'd been too afraid of Dumbledore to enter the castle, at least for very long. It might not have been him on the grounds, but it had likely been someone sent by him.

It was possible that he'd gotten a look at me and recognized me as the girl who should be dead; that might have been the reason he'd attacked me impulsively on the grounds, and then once he couldn't get in, he'd have sent his lackey after me.

Filch had been a nasty character, but he'd deserved better than to be killed. As far as I was concerned Avery was responsible for his death, and that was one more on his talley.

Having him attack me was a win-win. Either I died, or I killed Filch or seriously injured him. If I survived, they could send the aurors after me. That was the last thing I needed; after all the manner of death would reveal that insects were involved. That would eliminate my main advantage against my enemies; once they knew what I could do, there were likely countermeasures they could take.

I might be able to get out of this, but likely there would be a trial, and the Death Eaters had people in the Ministry. I could easily be killed on the way to the trial, or they could pad the jury with their own people... assuming Wizards actually used juries. I hadn't studied their judicial system all that much.

I glanced back at Filch. His body already smelled, and the odds were that it was only going to get worse.

Using my bugs to eat the body would be the ideal solution, but it would take time, time that I simply didn't have. Filch had to weight a hundred and sixty or a hundred and eighty pounds, and it would take days for the bugs to eat him normally, maybe weeks. I could probably cut that time down to a tenth, but

even if I could do it my morning, there was no guarantee that one of the girls wouldn't get up to go to the bathroom and see the mess I'd made.

Still, I had to try.

The bugs surrounded Filch and began eating as rapidly as they could. I had them work in shifts; when one got full it was replaced by its mate.

In the meantime I began to clean the bathroom as well as I could. I tossed the dismembered and now hairy arm to land next to the rest of the body.

"Sorry Filch," I said. "I'll avenge you."

My next task was to clean up the blood and gore all over the floor. My clothes had fortunately been left on the counter, which meant they were clean. As such, I was going to have to do the cleaning in the nude.

"Wingardium Leviosa," I murmured, focusing as much as I could on the bloody water on the floor. I managed to levitate a patch of it, which I put into the bathtub, after levitating the stopper and draining out the water.

Over and over again I had to do it, and when I was done, I wasn't sure that the floor was actually clean. I couldn't use my towels because having the house elves see bloody towels coming from a prepubescent girl's room was going to be a clear sign that something was wrong.

This was why I ended up on my hands and knees scrubbing the floor with toilet paper, wrapped around and around my hands. I could toss that in the toilet and wash the evidence away. I'd checked my hands, and there weren't any cuts on my skin, and there weren't any on my knees either.

In all, it took me over two hours to get every single piece of blood off the grout. I could have done it almost immediately with the cleaning spell, but I hadn't thought it to be worth the bother to learn, and I was now paying the price.

The only good thing was that if they checked my wand they'd see that I didn't get anything other than one severing charm off, and that one I could explain.

Grimacing, I looked at the body.

If I had caustic soda I'd be able to melt the body into a liquid that I could flush, but that would take heat and almost a full day.

Drain cleaner containing sodium hydroxide and a different drain cleaner containing sulfuric acid could be mixed together to melt the body too. It too would take time that I didn't have, and the smell would be a dead giveaway.

There was only one way that was going to work.

I pulled my secondary wand from my fanny pack, and I began to cast.

"Diffindo...Diffindo...Diffindo...Diffindo."

As I dismembered the body in clean cuts, more and more blood pooled on the tile. In retrospect, I should have waited on the cleaning until this part of it was done.

I had the largest spiders grab the parts and start carrying them up the wall toward the vent. I'd move them as far from my room as they could and then I'd set the bugs to devouring them as quickly as possible.

The increased food supply would probably increase their numbers exponentially, but that was all right.

Moving the whole body took more than another hour, and then cleaning what was left took even more time. By the time everything was said and done, I barely had time to slip into bed before the House Elves showed up and began to clean the bathroom that I had just vacated.

They seemed to notice some of the lingering smell, but they seemed to ignore it. From their muttered comments, apparently some of the Witches had cosmetic components that smelled foul to them, and they assumed this was just more of the same.

I fell into a dreamless sleep.

In the morning I was the last of the girls to get up, but I managed to pull myself to breakfast. The last thing I could afford was to stand out. I waited until the girls were in the bathroom to pull on the shirt that covered my neck as best I could.

There was a healing spell I could use to repair the bruises; I needed to learn it quickly, but I was a little leery of using it on myself without some practice. Miscast spells could cause all sorts of problems, such as a severed arm on the floor.

Although, in this one case it was less of a mistake than a feature.

Most of the day went by in a haze. My new body required a lot more sleep than my old one had, and I hadn't gotten enough even for an adult. My neck hurt, and it hurt to talk, and so I ended up looking sullen and taciturn all day.

I let Hermione chat away at me, and I didn't say much. When I did, she noticed my voice and tried to tell me to go to Madam Pomfrey.

As though that wouldn't raise some questions. Mr. Filch vanishes and the schools resident bad girl has unexplained bruises the next day.

I'd have aurors knocking on my door within three days.

My only option was to try the Episkey spell until I mastered it, and I'd have to start by practicing it on bugs.

I ended up spending my afternoon huddled in a secret passage, one of those that I had figured out the way to get inside. I reached out to my bug minions, and there were dozens or hundreds of them that were injured from skirmishes with each other, or with the rats in the walls.

I was glad I practiced; my first attempts ended up with scattered bugs. It was more than an hour before I wasn't killing the bugs, and two before I actually did them any good.

It was three before I got to the point where I was willing to try it on myself, and even then I was nervous. The neck had some pretty important arteries, and a mistake there could kill me just as easily as Filch.

As I was leaving the secret passage, I froze as I saw Mrs. Norris. She was staring up at me accusingly.

For a moment I considered killing her. It was possible that she could smell some of her master's blood on me, or that she had some sort of supernatural sense. Still, as far as I knew, Wizards couldn't talk to cats. Speaking to snakes was possible, but it was apparently a rare and lost art.

Guilt filled my mind. As disagreeable as Filch and Mrs. Norris had been to the students, they'd loved each other, and I'd taken that away from her. I hadn't become a hero... or even a villain to hurt people. I wasn't sure that Mrs. Norris counted as people, but the last thing I needed to do was to make it even worse by killing her.

I left her alone. I hadn't meant to kill her master, and killing his cat would have been throwing insult after injury.

Doing the healing in my own bathroom was my only option to be safe. The girls tended to be heavy sleepers, but in the day, if I fell over, it was possible they might hear me.

Staring in the mirror, I unbuttoned the neck of my shirt and pulled it away from my neck. I pointed my wand at my neck, and then I said in a low voice, "Episky."

I'd worried that pointing it at myself would change the wand movements to the point that it could;'t be used, but the moment I cast it, I felt a warmth on my neck, and suddenly some of the pain was gone. So was some of the bruising.

"Episky, Episky, Episky," I said quickly.

I soon found that there were spots on the back of my neck that I could not reach. Twisting my arms back there made moving the wand in the right way impossible. It was going to have to do; I'd just have to make an excuse if someone noticed.

At least it no longer looked like a pair of identifiable hand prints.

Those parts of the weekend that weren't spent in training and learning the cleaning spell, I spent reading up on Wizarding Law. I suspected that I knew what was coming next, and I wanted to be prepared for it.

I made sure that no one paid attention to the books I was reading; I didn't check the law books out and only pulled them from the shelves when no one was looking. I carefully kept the books face up on the table so that no one would notice the book covers.

On Monday, the aurors showed up for Hogwarts.