Things did not return to normal when classes resumed. Mina's grades, never great, were slipping. She had begun to skip divination and history of magic entirely. Her work in potions was so bad that Snape gave her detention to get her to step up, and her work in transfiguration had fallen to her previous standards in potions. The only class she was doing well in was care for magical creatures, as the best way to care for flobberworms was to ignore them.

She had stopped visiting Hagrid, who noticed how much her mood had darkened. He called her over one day to ask her what was wrong.

"Nothing."

"Don' give me tha.' Ye've stopped comin' te visit Buckbeak. He misses yeh, by th' way. Perks up about the time yeh used te come and then gets disappointed and mopey when yeh don' show. An' yeh don' smile in class no more."

"I don't smile anymore because all we do is stare at those stinking flobberworms all day!" she shouted. Hagrid shook his head and walked away, leaving Mina feeling guilty on top of everything else.

Mina reacted the same way when other people tried to help her. Hannah's persistence in questioning Mina about what was bothering her eventually led to her yelling at Hannah for five whole minutes things such as "I'm fine!," "Nothing is bothering me!" and "It's none of your business anyway!" Afterwards the two stopped speaking to each other.

Mina's anti-dementor classes had ended. Professor Lupin said that he no longer had the time, as he had fallen ill ('or rather turned into a werewolf' Mina thought with a twinge of anger) twice already during the semester, though the second time he did not miss his class with the Hufflepuff third years. He had agreed to teach Harry Potter the patronus spell, but again only after the beginning of the next term. As Harry was by now well behind Mina in learning to fight dementors she would not resume her lessons when Harry started. "Besides," Professor Lupin had said, "you need the extra time to get your grades up."

Harry himself had taken had taken to talking to her often after care for magical creatures. He wanted to know more about the patronus charm and Mina was also the only one in the school he could talk to about his experiences with the dementors as she was the only other person who fainted because of them.

Just a few weeks earlier Mina would have been delighted to talk to Harry Potter so often, but now it just annoyed her. Despite also fainting and remembering horrible things in his past, Mina couldn't tell him or anyone else of her problems.

No one else had apparently killed many people in some sort of past life. No one else had this incredible power and no idea what to do with it or how to use it. She knew that Harry, like herself, continued to have nightmares as a result of his encounters with the dementors, but they were mostly of the dementors themselves, not of events which he knew nothing about.

In addition to her troubles in class, Mina was also having trouble on the Quidditch pitch. The match between Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw would take place at the end of November, less than a month after the game that the dementors interrupted, and Diggory was scheduling many practices in preparation.

But Mina found it as hard to concentrate on the quaffle as she did on Professor Binn's voice. She dropped passes, missed easy shots, and one time even flew right into the Hufflepuff keeper.

After that last incident Diggory gave her a mouthful.

"What the hell are you doing out there? We need our people flying at their best, not into walls! You may be the best flyer on the team, but you're not going to stay on the team at this rate!"

And on top of everything else Mina now had to endure the personification of rudeness that was Draco Malfoy. Immediately after the disastrous Quidditch match of early November he had taken the bandages off of his "newly healed" arm and proceeded to celebrate by doing imitations of a dementor for the Slytherins. He had enough of a following in his own house that it did not matter to him that he had earned the enmity of the other three houses in recent weeks.

He only teased Mina about her fainting because of the dementors when he saw her, as opposed to his going out of his way to drive the point with Harry Potter. That is, until he learned of Mina's ancestry. So it was that Mina found him and his cronies, the large and stupid Crabbe and Goyle, waiting for her outside the Hufflepuff common room.

"Oh look," Malfoy said with a smirk, "it's the other one who can't stay on a broomstick. But I should have known that Mudbloods are too pathetic to deal with dementors or brooms.

Like a sudden burst of thunder Mina was on Malfoy, pushing him into the wall behind him and raising her wand to his face. The other Hufflepuffs nearby who had been about to shout at Malfoy were cowed by her anger, as were Crabbe and Goyle, who did nothing to help Malfoy.

"Call me that again." she hissed. "Go on! Call me that again!" Her wand was only inches from Malfoy's face, and all he did was whimper. "Next time," she threatened in his ear, "I'll use you as a bludger. And you'll really stay in bandages."

"What's going on here?" came the voice of Professor Snape. Mina released Malfoy as the Hufflepuffs tried to explain to Snape what had happened, but he said that all he had seen was Mina threatening Malfoy with a wand. So Mina got another detention and Malfoy got off scott-free.

Crabbe and Goyle laughed as they followed Snape away, but Mina could see that Malfoy was hunched over and still quite terrified. For the first time in a long while she smirked.

After her next Quidditch match Malfoy would have nothing to make fun of her about again./

The match against Ravenclaw was a tough one. True, they did not have the raw skill of the Gryffindor team, but this time Hufflepuff was without the advantage the wind had given them in the previous match. It was Mina, with a renewed determination, who kept Hufflepuff in the lead. It was thirty minutes in and she had scored every time she shot. But the other Hufflepuff chasers were not up to the task of facing an opponent without an advantage, and so the score remained close.

At that point the Ravenclaw beaters began to change their strategy. They had been focusing mostly on hitting the bludgers toward Diggory as beaters are wont to, for the seeker ends the game and scores a hundred and fifty points in an instant. Now they targeted Mina with the bludgers, for Diggory seemed no closer to catching the snitch than he had at the beginning of the match, and the beaters perceived that by subduing Mina Ravenclaw would be able to take a substantial lead, possibly enough to win without the snitch.

At first the strategy seemed to work, for Mina's shots became few and far between as she had to constantly dodge two bludgers and in another twenty minutes Ravenclaw was up by fifty points.

But the Hufflepuff beaters still focused primarily on the Ravenclaw seeker, Cho Chang. And, though they were not as effective as the Ravenclaw beaters, and as good a flier as Chang was, she was under pressure from the bludgers while Diggory was largely free to scan the field for the snitch.

They were lucky that it took him as long as it did to find and catch the snitch, for the final score was close enough for Ravenclaw to stay in the running for the Quidditch cup, though Gryffindor, which had needed Hufflepuff to lose horribly, was all but out. It was rotten luck for them, as on paper they were the best team Hogwarts had seen in more than twenty years.

But the bad turn of events for the Gryffindor team were of little concern for the Hufflepuffs, who with two wins were now the favorites to win the cup for the first time in recent memory. It was the first time since she had transformed in the room of requirement that Mina laughed.

But she continued to have nightmares about the evil woman, and her good mood turned sour again quickly, even if Malfoy left her alone from then on. And it was possibly due to what had happened to the Gryffindor Quidditch team, but Harry Potter stopped speaking to her about the dementors after the next Hogsmeade weekend and his mood became as bad as Mina's. Though their conversations had annoyed her she was still bothered by the fact that Harry had stopped talking to her.

Never had Mina been more glad to leave Hogwarts for the Christmas holidays than that semester, but she could not have imagined that it was in the muggle world that she would find the answers she had spent months looking for in the magical one.