Chapter 12-The Happy Accident

I hug a jacket tightly around my body. The cold bites right through me. It reaches like a hand into my intestines and twists up like a ghastly set of vines. I bring Leo's body close to me. I can't remember being this close to another human since hugging my mother just before entering the Hogwarts Express for the third time.

I stare at the man before me. No, not man. Goblin. He sneers at me and grins wickedly at Leo, teeth barred in grotesque sets of blackened molars.

"I would give it to you if I could," Leo promises him. "But I don't know how! I didn't even know I had it!"

"She seemed to," the goblin says, gesturing towards me.

A goblin launches towards me, but freezes when I press my wand firmly into his throat. "I don't know how to get the Living Pearl out any better than he does!" I tell them.

"Ah, but how did you know the boy had the Pearl in the first place?"

"Ah…" I falter, sifting through my vision from before. The Shrieking Shack. They'd dragged him off there, forcing him against the wall in a body-bind curse.

"How do we get it out?!"

"We cut it out, of course! Baxg kept it to the grave. The only way to get rid of it is to kill its owner!"

"No! Think! They'll trace it back to us! It'll just give the ministry an excuse to persecute our race more than it already has!"

"Let them try and we'll see where all their galleons go."

"Quiet! The both of you! If we aren't careful to make sure we aren't caught, Jagobin with have his men on us!"

Jagobin is definitely an enemy, judging by the way the spoke of him. I hesitate. If I blurt out a name from my vision, won't they be suspicious of how easily I broke? Still, there's a finger pointed at Leo looking like it'd like nothing more than to mash his insides into a smoothie and spray them across the gravestones, leaving a shimmering metal ball of magic rolling in the spinal fluid of a dead wizard. The image makes my heart clench. He's the only one who ever notices me. Aside from Frieda, but he's different from her…because of the Living Pearl. That has to be it. I realize, though, that it doesn't matter. I'm attached to Leo now. The first new person I've cared about since I was put under this wretched curse. I don't want anything to happen to him.

The goblin before me unknowingly gives me an opportunity by swatting the wand from my hand and shoving me into Leo so the blood from his nose streams into my hair. A fingernail is at my forehead in seconds and I feint breathing hard and fast in a panic. "It was Jagobin!" I shout, praying to Helga Hufflpuff my dues have been paid. I turn my head away and crouch as the nail slowly comes away from my head from the surprised goblins.

"Jagobin! He knows!" one shouts.

Another looks skeptical. "Jagobin? How? How? How? He couldn't know! The information's concealed."

The original turns back to me, offering an interesting gaze. "Do you know why Jagobin wants that Pearl?" I shake my head, hair flying into my face from my ponytail. He takes some shaky steps forward. The goblin's natural walking process is awkward and tangled like a wind-up toy. "Jagobin wants the pearl for purely selfish reasons. Wants it to rebuild a society of treachery to serve him. We want it for a noble reason. To return it to our kind. Everything made from the goblins belongs to us. It was our handiwork. It's rightfully ours to keep. We're just trying to take back what wizards seized from us."

"But you rejected Baxg when he came to your kind with the invention! Just because now you found out it has power gives you no right to take it back. You can't take the Pearl like that from Leo; it belongs to him now." I object. "The Living Pearl has its own right to accept or reject its owner. It's his as long as it's inside him and your killing him will only make it resent you! You'll be nothing but a bunch of thieves!"

"HOLD YOU TONGUE! Anything goblin made is ours by law!"

"Your law, not ours. I'll bet the reason Baxg never told anyone he gave the Living Pearl away was because he knew you'd try and take it back! He wanted it in someone's hands other than a goblin's after your kind banished him!"

"That's it! Shut her up!"

Just as the goblin draws his arm back to strike, a scream echoes through the graveyard. Leo and I look up from our crouched positions, but just as my head turns, Leo grabs my shoulders and yanks me into the cold hard ground. Something hits my side, causing me to cry out. Something or rather someone fell over me. Poking our heads up, we see a swarm of what look like giant spiders crawling our way, advancing like a pack of ravenous wolves. Leo and a girl both grab me and launch the trio of us behind a gravestone.

"Oh, hello, Leo," Rose smiles, panting all the while. Her silky, carrot-colored hair has been transformed into a mess of snarls around her head. "Ah, and I don't believe we've met."

"Carina, Rose. Rose, Carina," Leo introduces uselessly.

"What are you talking about?" Rose asks him.

He stares at her for a moment incredulously, then shakes it off, deciding the spiders perhaps are a better issue. I tuck my head over a gravestone to view a giant, eight-legged creature climb over the gravestones near the forest as if they were pebbles. The hairy creature's eyes look like giant droplets of mud, gurgling around in his head. I throw my wand back and scream, "Confringo!" Giant limbs and mixtures of blood, bile, and waste fly back and crack old gravestones in half like foam packing peanuts before painting them morbid shades of red and black. I vault the gravestone and climb forward quickly on my hands and feet.

I notice Patricia behind a gravestone. What in Merlin's name is she doing here? And Rose and…well, apparently Albus as well. He hops a crumbling granite rock as a wall of lethal baby arachnids flow towards him and shouts, "ARANEA FERIO MAXIMA!" The black mass explodes back, conforming around an invisible bubble of air that turns the spiders to mist and dust the instant it's touched. It lashes through the graveyard and flattens the impending hoard like a steel sheet flattening snow.

I cough a bit, imagining the gravestone behind me holds the impression of my body in blood and guts. I shiver as I pick pieces of intestine off my shoulder and hands. "You've got something there," Leo says, red coating his mouth, neck and chest from the goblin's blow. He turns my face towards him and pulls a gooey night crawler from the lining of my ear and face.

"Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeew!" I shiver and stomp around, yanking out my ponytail and shaking my hair in a dance that perhaps somewhat resembled the cross between a rain dance, the Charleston, and an epileptic's standing seizure. In all, I cannot see this moment as one of my most attractive.

"Funny, I hadn't had you pegged as squeamish," he smirks, lifting the bloody little fellow before his eyes as it curls upwards.

I shiver in disgust as I turn to the vile image of Albus chasing Patricia gleefully with arachnid…leftovers.

"It looks as if our friends have been finished," Leo notes, staring at the now empty graveyard as the two fifth years scramble past. Patricia screamed that if Albus didn't get away this instant, she'd hex him.

"Your friends?" Rose asks. "Who?"

"No one," Leo says. "Just some chipmunks." She obviously hadn't seen the goblins, but we both know that if they were taken by the spiders, there is nothing left of them by now. The situation is a rather extreme coincidence I find suspiciously too happy to be an accident.