"This is a little like a... what do you call it over there... a slumber party?" Hermione said.
I'd laid my bedroll near hers, Harry's and Neville's , and we were near the center of the Great Hall. We'd carefully arranged the children who were best at Patronuses near the entrance, with the younger and weaker children near the center.
I was in the middle because I couldn't cast a decent patronus to save my life, or anyone else's, but also because I was the last line of defense should the Dementors get through to attack the weak and helpless children in the middle.
"Every slumber party I've ever been too was a lot more fun than this," I said.
There was a general aura of unease in the students. Everyone was on edge, and even the youngest children weren't laughing or playing.
"I'm just glad you were able to talk Professor McGonagall into letting us sleep like this," Hermione said.
"She's not entirely against us," I said. "And telling her that it would be easier to keep an eye on us this way probably helped."
Headmaster Rowle was away for the week and McGonagall was in charge. Apparently Rowle had been called out of town for a Ministry meeting. That had been our first clue that the attack would happen soon.
"Maybe we should do something to calm everyone down," Hermione said. "A game or something?"
Looking around I could see the fear on everyone's faces. Half the aurors had been pulled away from the castle for the holidays, and half those who were left were asleep in their rooms.
We did have one, Tonks who was sitting and watching us from a bed she'd made where the professors usually sat.
"We've got Caterwauling charms on all the entrances," I said after a moment. "So it's probably safe."
We could have gone with simple intruder charms, but they weren't nearly as loud, and there was a chance that some of us might not wake up. The Caterwauling charms would wake up the entire castle.
There was no telling how long it would take before the attack happened; if I'd run things, I'd have had it happen in the middle of the night, when people were less able to defend themselves. Letting the children be in a constant state of fear and anxiety until then would only exhaust them more quickly.
Furthermore, I had my bugs actively looking, and more importantly feeling for the Dementors. The cold they exuded would be obvious long before their physical presence was noted.
"Hey guys," Hermione said. "Do you want to tell ghost stories?"
Everyone turned and stared at me, and I felt myself flushing.
"Uh... I won't be telling them," I said.
There was an almost universal sigh of relief which I found vaguely insulting. I was capable of telling a ghost story that wouldn't give children nightmares for the rest of the year.
Of course, I had some that would.
"How would you like to hear a ghost story from a real ghost?" Hermione asked.
Myrtle was sitting at the edge of the wall, staring at us. We had to be the most entertaining thing that had happened to her in a while.
"What, me?" she asked.
Hermione nodded.
Most people hadn't had much to do with Myrtle, finding her a little too grating, but Hermione had gone with me a couple of times to talk with her. I'd done it because I'd promised I would, and because a ghost was an excellent scout, not being stopped by walls and all.
"Are you sure?" she asked.
"As long as it's not about how you died," Hermione said firmly. "These are small children and that story might be too scary for them."
Myrtle looked like she might protest, but then her chest swelled up with pride. Apparently having her death be too scary was a good thing.
She tended to get upset and started crying when she talked about her own death; the last thing we needed right now when everyone was on edge.
I glanced at Hermione, who looked all too pleased with herself. She was getting better at manipulating people since she'd been working as my second in command.
"Well," Myrtle said. "There is a story that I don't hear anybody telling anymore. In my day they talked about five hidden rooms in Hogwarts, each protected by a different curse."
She had everyone's interest with that one.
"Nobody knows where they came from. Some people say it was Salazar Slytherin; other people say they were build later by a Headmaster who'd gone a little mad. Some people say that they were built around something so dangerous that it could not be moved."
I could hear some of the younger children oohing and ahhing.
I hadn't seen anything like that in my explorations of the castle, but then I hadn't seen the Room of Requirement either.
"Have you ever seen one of the rooms?" one of the younger first years asked.
Myrtle shook her head.
"Nobody has ever come back from one of those rooms alive... and no ghost has ever come back from them either. There have been children who went looking for them, but they were never seen again."
The younger children looked impressed, although the older ones looked like they'd heard it before. What other rumors hadn't I heard about? The castle was a thousand years old, and there were undoubtedly all sorts of things that no one knew about.
I stiffened as I felt an overwhelming wave of cold spreading throughout the northwest quadrant of the castle.
"They are coming," I said, standing up. "Everyone knows what they are supposed to do, right?"
I heard whimpers from the first years; they hadn't joined our group and so they didn't have any of the training.
When overwhelming terror fills the human brain, the higher brain functions shut down, which is why people are often stupid when they are terrified. For most of human history the ability to run fast was more important than the ability to think well.
Training helped to combat that tendency. Those who were trained enough would fall back on their training when they could no longer think, hopefully doing the right thing.
Still, would a few weeks training be enough?
"Where are the Professors?" Tonks asked. There was a look of panic in her eyes as she looked around at the students around her, doubtlessly thinking that she'd have to protect all of us at the same time.
"Half were sent home for the holidays," I said. "Some new cost saving measure of the Minister's. Some of them are asleep."
"Send a message to Professor Snape," I told one of the seventh years. "He'll alert the others."
He wasn't actually asleep, but it would take time for him to come from the dungeons, especially if he waited to summon the others.
I'd had the portrait of Norvel Twonk moved from the fifth floor landing on the staircase to the Grand Hall. My excuse had been that he could watch over the boys and girls to make sure that they behaved themselves.
My true motives had been different. The man whose portrait he was based on had died saving a muggle child. He'd been granted the Order of Merlin posthumously. He'd died sometime in the fifties.
"Mr. Twonk, could you please alert the Deputy Headmistress and as many of the professors as you can?"
I'd hoped that he would be favorable to our cause; the look in his eye proved me right.
"I would be honored, Miss Hebert," he said.
"Bring out the mirrors," I said.
As it turned out, I wasn't the only one who'd had communications mirrors; most muggleborn didn't, of course, but we'd begged, borrowed and stolen every one we could find and had set them up in unobtrusive places, usually in the ceilings in the corners of the hallways.
We'd only managed to steal five sets, and now the images flared into place. I didn't have to remind everyone to keep quiet; we'd gone over this at least a dozen times. The dementors were blind, but they could hear just fine.
I could hear Tonks indrawn breath beside me as we saw at least a dozen dementors gliding silently through the hallways, hovering only a couple of feet above the floor. They moved with purpose, as though they knew exactly where we would be. Given that we were the greatest source of good feelings in the castle, doubtlessly they knew.
They were coming toward us from at least three directions; there had to be at least fifty of them. If they'd caught us sleeping, they could have finished all of us off and been hungry for more.
Once they'd all passed, I quietly shut the mirrors off.
"Front lines, to the doors," I said. "We have five minutes until they are here. Prepare your patronuses appropriately. If they manage to push past them, fall back. We will leave no man behind."
The problem was that of the thirty of us who could cast patronuses, only three were able to cast corporeal patrunuses.
We closed and locked the doors, of course, magically. I wasn't sure how good the Dementors were against physical barriers, but I didn't want to chance it on the kinds of dodgy patronuses we could cast.
"Block the doors," I said. "And set up the tables."
They quickly moved the tables we'd shrunk earlier against the doors, and they set some of the others in the center of the room, tipped over to provide at least a little cover.
"Mr. Creevy," I said. "You know what you have to do."
He nodded, his face resolute. I wondered if he would be able to do what had to be done, but there wasn't time to change the plan now.
"BOOM!"
The door near where the professors' table usually stood shook as something hit it from the other side. Some of the younger children screamed in terror.
"BOOM!"
The main entrance doors shuttered. We could hear pounding as the monsters within tried to get in.
"Maybe the doors will hold?" Harry said.
The large window behind the professor's usual dining spot exploded, shards striking several children and I could hear screaming as row after row of the monsters floated over the lip of the window and into the room.
"Expecto Patronum!" Tonks yelled from beside me, and suddenly a silvery white jackrabbit appeared between us and the monsters.
"Retreat to the center," I yelled, and I was gratified to see that they followed my lead.
I could hear the spell being cast over and over again, until a silver haze surrounded us, even as the monsters continued to fill the room.
The patronuses of the three who could cast them, along with Tonk's Jackrabbit were circling us, stopping the dementors from getting any closer. There was a leopard, a boar and a white poodle.
I could see some of the white haze vanishing as the pressure on our minds grew with the presence of more and more dementors.
I shoved my emotions into my bugs as hard as I could, and my mind cleared.
It was time for my backup plan.
I'd been working on it for weeks, and then it had taken longer to teach the others. I'd hoped not to have to use it, because it was sure to raise questions I couldn't answer.
There were seventh and sixth years who couldn't raise a patronus; they could do this.
"It's time!" I shouted.
"Spunam ineloquence!" the first of them shouted.
A familiar yellowish white foam prayed from his wand; it hit one of the dementors, and it hardened suddenly. Seeing that it worked, other voices rose and foam was suddenly being sprayed in all direction.
It had taken me weeks to transmute ordinary water into containment foam. I'd worked with it for years, and I'd been intimately familiar with its taste, smell, and even some of the basics of its constructions, even though others were trade secrets.
Despite my familiarity, it hadn't been easy figuring out how to make it. It was a little humiliating that it had taken a team of sixth and seventh years half the time to come up with a spell to conjure it from nothingness, modifying a basic water conjuring spell.
I sometimes thought that our greatest contribution to the Wizarding world was going to be group spell research. Edison had done something similar; before him, researchers were essentially single guys in their basements. Afterwards, it was done almost like an assembly line. The expansion of human knowledge had grown exponentially.
The white mist around us that had been fading brightened suddenly.
Hope was apparently helpful in casting a patronus.
We were surrounded now by a wall of containment foam, with baleful faces staring out at us fulled with hatred.
More were behind them, but if I was right...
"EXPECTO PATRONUM!" I heard two voices call out.
A doe and a cat appeared, brighter than anything our people had been able to create, and the dementors were suddenly fleeing through the windows.
Snape and Professor McGonagall were at the entrance; they'd managed to open the doors and move the tables while we were busy fighting the dementors.
I looked over at Colin; he'd been busy snapping photos throughout the entire event, just as I'd asked him too.
He hadn't cowered, even when the other children his age had. He'd known just how important what he was doing was.
Wars had been considered good sport in the old days; it wasn't until pictures and movies of the real thing had brought the horror into people's living rooms that attitudes had changed.
This was going to be in the Quibbler tomorrow if I had anything to do about it. Seeing the muggleborn as heroes might not be quite as good as seeing a pathetic, dying child, but it might begin to change people's minds.
A series of moving pictures, of dementors menacing cowering children? They say a picture is worth a thousand words. A moving picture had to be worth more than that.
"What's going on here?" McGonagall asked. She looked flustered.
"The Ministry tried to kill us again," I said, standing up. From where they were standing I couldn't be seen; all they'd hear was my voice coming from behind a wall of containment foam.
Getting us out was harder than I'd thought. I had a lot of experience with containment foam, but my experience with the stuff they used to dissolve it was much less. I hadn't been able to create the counter, and we were completely surrounded.
We eventually had to settle for McGonagall transmuting a section of the wall into pigs even as Snape and Tonks drove the dementors within away. Even so, we had to file single file past dementors who were uncomfortably close.
We all ended up in the hospital section while aurors began to appear at the edge of the lawn and moving in to investigate.
As I drank hot chocolate along with the rest of them... I didn't need it, but chocolate was chocolate, I spoke in a low voice to my inner circle.
"They'll try to pin this on the Death Eaters," I said. "If we wait, they'll sweep this under the rug and when summer comes, we'll all be dead. We have to move tonight."
They stared at me, and they nodded grimly.
There had been a time where the sixth and seventh years would have been reluctant to follow my lead. That time was long past.
We'd been planning on dealing with the Trace all semester, and the best time to do it was tonight. No one would expect us to do anything while we were recovering from an attack, and they'd be busy dealing with the aftermath of what had happened here. With any luck, we could be there and back before anyone knew we had gone.
I'd known that we'd end up in the infirmary, and so the plan had been based around that.
The aurors were guarding the doors and they were heading for the windows outside.
"Brooms," I said.
There were going to be six of us; me and six seventh years. All of them were older than seventeen and the Trace wouldn't apply to them. I was the only one who couldn't cast any spells once we got outside of all Wizarding areas.
Our brooms had been magically shrunk in our pockets.
The sixth years were already transfiguring copies of us and putting them into bed. Hopefully the aurors wouldn't try to question me before I got back; Pomfrey had given me a sleeping draught, which I had spit out when she'd been distracted by someone else.
All of us leaped onto our brooms and disillusioned ourselves. One of the sixth years transfigured the window above us, and we were out. A moment later, the window was replaced.
As we flew into the night air, I couldn't help but grin.
I'd been passive the whole time I'd been here, responding to attack after attack, but never being proactive. Now, finally, I was ready to take the fight to the enemy, to do something that fundamentally changed the equation.
Without the Trace, we'd be able to hide in the muggle population. Unlike the purebloods, we knew the muggle world like the backs of our hands. They wouldn't find us until it was too late.
All we had to do was get through the security at the Ministry, destroy the source of the Trace, and get out while pinning the blame on the Death Eaters.
I'd never backed away from a challenge.