"How many of us can you hide under your cloak?" I asked Harry.
Although the figures above were blurred, they were still casting shadows on the ground. Undoubtedly they thought they hadn't been detected.
"Three, maybe four in a pinch," he said.
Looking around, I grimaced. There were too many of us here to protect that way.
"Ron," I said. "Go up and stay with your brothers. They'll be focusing on muggleborns, so you'll probably be all right if you keep your head down and your mouth shut. Tell your brothers what's happening, but keep it quiet. We don't want to start a panic."
He stared at me, his face white, but he nodded.
"They're in the second train car."
We were at the back of the train. Moody had wanted that because it would make attacks from other students come from only one direction. I'd already planned on that anyway, of course.
He hesitated, glancing at Harry.
"I'm going to do everything I can to keep Harry alive," I said. "But I can't do that if there are hostages all around me."
He nodded, and he was gone a moment later.
Turning to Millie and Tracey, I said, "Go and stay with Flora and Hestia Carrow. They're fairly decent. If you are questioned, don't be afraid to call me a mudblood, or psychotic... anything to make them think that you are on their side. What you are going to tell them is that you hate me and that you were forced to be my roomates... and only tell them that if you are asked. They aren't going to have a lot of time to do this, and that means they'll be in a hurry. I doubt they'll question you very hard."
They nodded, and got up without questioning me.
"They're in the first car," I said.
That left me with Harry, Hermione and Neville.
"They're going to be after the four of us. Me and Harry for obvious reasons, Hermione because it would hurt me to lose her, and Neville because his mother has taken the cure. We can't just go and hide among the crowds."
We couldn't do it for the same reason Moody hadn't been able to keep disillusioned troops on board; the quarters were too cramped.
"We are going to have to get off the train," I said.
There were six Death Eaters coming; presumably Voldemort had assumed that without a swarm of Acromantula to protect me, I'd be easy meat. Worse, because of my dueling performance, they weren't likely to underestimate me.
There were things I could do to kill them that I didn't dare to do; there were enough kids on the train that using explosions would kill some of them; that would set the entire Wizarding world against me.
The only option was to get on the train while seeming to be on the train.
Reaching into my fanny pack, I pulled out four packets of Darkness powder. I would have the bugs drop them in the back four train cars as I was leaving. Not only would that convince the Death Eaters that I was there, but it would focus them away from the cars in the front, where our friends were.
There was a knock at the door.
The trolley witch was at the door.
"Would anyone like something to eat?" she asked.
I stood up.
"Death Eaters are about to attack this train," I said. "They are on brooms and are disillusioned. Could you please send a message to the aurors?"
She looked at me for a moment, and then her face tightened. Apparently she'd been informed of the upcoming attack, presumably for just such an attempt as this one.
She pulled out her wand, and murmured something.
Three silver cats appeared, and I felt a strange warmth just being in their presence. It reminded me a little of being around the unicorns. For just a moment I felt a surging warmth of hope, and then they were gone.
"We'll just have to see about slowing them down until help comes, won't we," she said. She put her wand to her own throat.
"ALL STUDENTS ARE TO RETURN TO THEIR COMPARTMENTS," she said. "AND PREPARE TO BE BOARDED."
I'd never really looked at the trolley witch before; she'd always just been a part of the scenery. Now, though, there was something sinister about her expression.
"The train protects its own," she said. "People forget that."
A moment later she was gone.
I blinked. Somehow she'd gotten onto the roof of the train without my understanding how, and she stood there ignoring the wind. Her trolley was with her.
She looked upward, and then she pulled a pumpkin pasty from the trolley. She tossed it up in the air, and then there was a massive explosion.
I'd managed to get bugs onto the brooms of all six of the Death Eaters, and I could feel them dodging around the explosions.
The trolley witch began to throw more and more of the pasties, and they were getting closer and closer to the disguised Death Eaters.
Flashes of green light began to lash down toward the top of the train.
I could see the frightened faces of students at the window.
"We need to get out," I said. "How many people can ride a broom?"
"At our size we might be able to get three on a broom," Harry said. "But it would be slow. They'd catch up to us in no time."
"Then we need to get two of their brooms," I said. "They probably know that we're in the last car; I'm sure some of the seventh years have mirrors and would have told them. That means that we can't be here."
"Doesn't Malfoy have one of those trunks that are expandible?" Neville asked. "I heard him bragging about it the other day. You can put people inside of there."
"We can't hide in the luggage," Potter said. "They'd be looking for something like that."
"Higgs just taught us the shrinking charm, though," I said. I'd heard that shrinking a human being was complicated and dangerous, but it might be possible that people in an expanded space weren't actually inside normal space at all. There had to be a reason why Moody couldn't see inside my fanny pack.
"You want us to get inside the trunk, and then shrink it," Hermione said flatly.
I nodded.
"Would you rather face that?" I asked.
The trolley witch was incredibly fast. Somehow none of the green bolts managed to hit her. Likely it was because the spells themselves were slow, which meant that from a distance they were easy to anticipate and dodge. It was going to get harder for her the closer they got.
"Let's go, then," Hermione said.
A moment later we were making our way up the train. Along the way, I dropped bits of darkness powder.
Five cars up, we reached Malfoy's compartment.
Opening the door, we saw a group of boys huddled up the window. Malfoy whirled as he saw us.
"Give us your trunk," I said, in a voice that allowed for no argument. My wand was out and pointed at him, so that might have had something to do with his acceptance.
He pointed, and a moment later, we had the trunk down. Harry and Neville were pulling things out of the trunk, and then a moment later, Neville and Hermione were climbing into the trunk.
I closed my eyes and hoped that I wasn't about to crush one of my few friends in this world.
"Reducio," I said.
Draco's face paled even more as he stared at the trunk, now small enough to slip inside my fanny pack. Before I could worry about the implications of putting an enlarged space inside of another enlarged space, I slipped it inside.
No matter how well this worked, there was only a limited amount of air inside that trunk. It was likely that we had less than thirty minutes before they started to suffocate.
We left before the boys had a chance to say anything.
"I'm the better flyer," Harry said. "That means that you'll have to be the gunner."
I nodded.
His being the better flyer wasn't in question; people were ready talking about how he'd likely make the team next year. He flew rings around everyone else, including me.
"Our weight is going to slow things down, though," he said. "I hope you have a plan."
"Yeah," I said. "They're going to expect us to be huddled in the back. We aren't going to do that. We're going to head to the front of the train, and then we're going to attack them from behind. We only need to get a single broomstick, and then we need to keep them from knowing that we've left, for a while at least."
"That's a lot," he said.
"It can be done. Let's go."
We made our way up through several more cars before I thought we were far enough.
The Death Eaters had landed on the roof of the train, presumably because trying to fire from a broom was too unstable to get a clear shot. They were still disillusioned, but I could see their shields dealing with the exploding pastries.
I had bugs on them, and on the roof of the train, it was loud. I was going to depend on that.
Opening the door as quietly as a could, I gestured for Potter to lift me up. He grimaced as I put my shoe on his shoulder, but a moment later I was on the roof of the train.
The one disadvantage to this was that I couldn't actually tell which direction they were looking. I had bugs in their clothes and on their wands, but I couldn't see their faces or their expressions.
It didn't matter.
Crouching low and moving as silently as I could, all I could hear was the whistling of the wind and the sounds of exploding pasties.
I scuttled forward, and I reached into my fanny pack, pulling out my best knife. I'd made several by now, and this was the pinnacle of my art.
The bugs on my opponent alerted me that he was already turning; presumably I'd made a noise that had alerted him. It was too late, though.
My knife lashed out, and I hit the subclavian artery in the front of the shoulder. This had the bonus of being his wand arm, which would make it harder for him to simply use the killing curse on me.
His disillusionment vanished, and now I could see the expressionless mask staring down at me. I shoved my knife into his armpit, then stabbed him in the side of the neck.
That did the trick; blood fountained everywhere, and he stumbled and fell, sliding off the side and falling off the train.
I grabbed his broom, and I could feel the Death Eaters behind me turning; they'd seen their compatriots body flying past them ou8t of the die of their eye.
I dodged as a barrage of green light flew past me.
A moment later, I was back in the space between cars. If they were smart they'd keep some people up top while sending some others down below to trap us.
As we slipped back into the car, I said, "Hold onto the back of my shirt."
Potter complied, and as I saw the door opening all the way at the other end of the car, I send an explosion that rocked the car for a moment.
I threw darkness powder, and as soon as I did, I pulled Potter down. Green light flashed above us dimly, where our heads had been.
I scrambled forward and I opened the door to the compartment to the right. It had four Slytherin fourth years, but a quick set of stunners made short work of them. In the dark they were helpless anyway. I used some quick spellwork to lift their bodies and I arranged them to look like they were sleeping.
Pointing my wand at the window, I used a shrinking charm on it, and with a groan, the air inside the chamber was suddenly buffeted by the wind from outside. The window itself was still inside the frame, although tiny now, and likely the wind would pull it out any time.
From the way the men inside the hallway were moving, I suspected that they'd lit a Hand of Glory. My use of the Peruvian Darkness Powder was well known, and they'd have brought the counter to that. With luck it wouldn't matter.
"Up," I said, and the broom in my hand was suddenly levitating.
Harry crawled on in front of me.
"Wrap us up in your cloak," I said. "After I enlarge it."
A quick spell later, and the cloak was more like a tarp than a cloak. We both struggled with it, trying to cover not just ourselves, but the broom as well. We put the front of the cloak so that the wind would help to drape it over us. It would leave our backsides uncovered, but there wasn't a lot that we could do about that.
A moment later we were outside.
I enlarged the window, which appeared back in its frame.
"Go low," I said into Harry's ear. "Otherwise they'll be able to see us from underneath."
It wasn't really from underneath that they could see us, but from behind, but he got my meaning. We dipped own low, and from above, there was only a shadow from behind as the cloth whipped and fluttered madly behind us.
We dipped until we were only a few feet from the ground.
They were checking the compartments one by one, convinced that sooner of later they'd find one of us. The ones up top were still distracted by the trolley witch, who'd somehow managed to transform her hands into blades and was using those to deflect spells. Who the hell was she?"
"Let's get the hell out of here," I said. "Away from the tracks. Hopefully they won't know where they lost us, which will cost them time, and make us harder to find."
We stopped and floated in mid-air, I grabbed one side of the cloak to keep it from slipping away, and Harry grabbed the other. We let the train pass by us as we sat, invisible.
As we passed the compartments behind, I used my bugs to drop darkness powder in them one by one.
We only had thirty minutes before I had to pull Harry and Neville out, and we only had a single broom. I didn't know the geography of Scotland; not only was I an American, which was notorious for its lack of interest in the rest of the world, I had been educated at Winslow, which had a particularly bad educational system.
Harry was from Surrey apparently, and I really had no idea where that was either.
As we flew so low over a passing lake that I could feel the spray of water on my legs, Harry said, "This is a Nimbus 2000. I've never gotten to fly one before, but they're the fastest brooms on the market."
Apparently Voldemort hadn't wanted to spare any expense when he'd decided to murder us.
"It'll go a hundred miles an hour with one person," he said. "And the two of us probably weigh about the same as one adult."
That was likely true.
"Where are we going?" I asked.
"Don't you know?" he asked. "I thought you were the Seer."
"There are limits," I said irritably. "If I knew everything, I'd just murder the Death Eaters in their sleep."
"That was pretty horrible, what you did back there," he said quietly. "I never really believed the troll story until now. I thought it was just something that Draco made up."
"It was him or us," I said. "It's always been that way. Kill or be killed. You think I wanted to do that?"
We were silent for several long minutes. I was acutely aware of the fact that Hermione and Neville might be smothering inside Draco's box, but we had to get far enough away that the Death eaters couldn't find us.
With any luck, they'd waste ten to fifteen minutes searching for us on the train cars due to the darkness powder. That would put them ten to fifteen miles ahead of us, and given our broom's speed, it would make us as much as another twenty five miles away.
However, there were undoubtedly ways for them to track us.
"Find us a cave," I said.
"Right," he said.
We were above another mountain lake now.
We'd find a cave, I was sure. The only question was how long it would take them to think of writing a letter to us, and how long it would take the owl to reach us.
Would Dumbledore and company find us first, or would I have to murder a couple of more of them in a last stand?
If we survived this, I could only hope that my summer went better.