Chapter 24-Runes and Revelations

The instant I arrive in the waiting room at St. Mungo's, I jump from the fireplace and turn to see Lorcan appear. Nathan, Lysander, and Jeremy follow and we're instantly running. From here, Lysander takes the lead. I don't know where his mother is, but he does. He and Lorcan have been visiting her this year. We ride several floors up in the elevator and get out at a wing in which screaming immediately fills our ears, yet I know it isn't Mrs. Scamander. This is shrill and hysterical. I've always imagined her voice like a bird's gentle coo. Lorcan has a bit of that. We walk down the way and see blank faces in loose clothing. They don't look at anything and live their lives devoid of reality. Strangely enough, this place doesn't bother me. It almost seems strange to me that I haven't come to visit this place just to pass the time on a long summer's day.

A nurse comes down the hall and stops when she sees us, perhaps to say that visiting hours are over, but I grab her eyes with mine own and she stops, thoughtless, before walking away down an adjacent hallway. Jeremy and Nathan have seen it all and stare at me.

"I've been near the Pearl so long," I say. "It's made me more powerful. I know it."

We start to continue walking, but Nathan stops us.

"Let them go," he says.

So we watch the Scamander twins turn into a room and wait.

"It isn't fair," Jeremy says, "that Lorcan should be like this when he sees his mother for the last time. I'll kill whoever did this."

"Just something a Gryffindor would say," Nathan says,

"Something a Hufflepuff would say too," I tell him. I look at the door the twins have vanished through, but I feel Jeremy's eyes on me.

Presently, Nathan steps forward until he slowly reaches the door and I follow him. The room is small and white and Luna Scamander lay in bed with her hair long and flowing out about her head. Lysander cradles her hand in his and speaks low and softly to her, but she is far away, mumbling strange words, some of which I do recognize, but most are strange like some blend of English, German, and Italian.

"Must be the words that accompany the runes," Nathan says.

"What?" I ask.

"What she's saying."

"If that's true, shouldn't whatever the spell is break?"

Nathan smirks. "You really never paid attention in school, did you?"

"I never had ancient runes." I hear it is such a terrible bore.

"Runes don't work by saying their meaning like spells do. You have to write them on whatever's being enchanted or, in this case, whatever's already been enchanted. You can say the words and write the symbols as many times as you want. Without the thing or person, it's pointless."

"Or person," I repeat.

"Or person," he verifies, looking at me. "What is it?"

I back up and breathe because now it all seems so clear that I could just smack myself for not seeing it before. I could drown myself in the pathetically shallow puddle of stupidity I have shown. I should have known it the moment Rose told me.

"It's Lovey," I whisper. I bump the wall behind me I turn back to look at it like I am surprised I didn't fall straight through it.

"Lovey?" Nathan asks. "What are you talking about?"

"Oh, God, it's Lovey, it's Lovey!" I tell them. I look around. I need to call to her somehow. I need the sun high above me so I can will her to me, but its rays are far from the dull inner walls of St. Mungo's. I run through the room and shove the curtains to the side to see the sun still high against the dull winter sky. I push and yank at the window relentlessly, but the cold frame won't open and I am too rushed and frantic to think of my wand. A hand touches my elbow and I stop to look at Jeremy behind me. He pulls at a latch at the edge of the window and slides it open for me. The small gesture calms me enough to remind me that I can't be this way. I grip the pane of the window and stare out at the pastel colors smeared into the clouds above the buildings and the wind picks my hair up behind me. I feel those few rays of sun seep into my skin and down deeper into my bones until I can feel the wind beneath every part of me and I am like a bird standing on both feet in that hospital wing.

"Please, I need to see Luna Scamander immediately!" It's a voice outside, in the hallway. I've never heard it a day in my life, but I know who it is.

"That's Leo's father," Jeremy says. He rushes out to the hallway and talks to the nurse for a time, but she won't let him in. They get into an argument. Finally, she concedes and plans to return later to check on everything. She won't. Not with me here. She'll forget this room even exists as long as I'm in it.

I turn around when they walk into the room. I'm not quite sure what I was expecting. He is skinny and a bit hunched, in his forties and is already mostly bald. Glasses reflect circles of light in front of his eyes so I can't see their color or if he recognizes me. The eyes don't really matter, though. He looks nothing like Leo.

On his shoulder is Lovey and I assume that is the main reason that the nurse was arguing with them.

"Lovey's the one the runes belong to," I say to Mr. Wespurt. It was meant to be a question, but it doesn't come out as such. Perhaps because I already know that I am right.

Mr. Wespurt nods and sets Lovey on the ground. He takes a piece of chalk from his pocket and slips it into Lorcan's hand. "Can you write?"

Lorcan instantly sketches out the runes along the floor and Lovey hops about his fingers like it's a game. He writes as if she's nonexistent, yet the runes form a circle about her. Now I understand why the runes he was writing before on parchment were slanted. Lorcan places his hands on the runes and recites the words in time with his mother's voice, his eyes moving along them as if he's reading them. Maybe he is. His eyes begin to shift and waver from brown to a startling emerald. The runes steadily begin to glow and shine. Lorcan and Mrs. Scamander's eyes widen as the light grows in intensity. Soon, Mr. Wespurt and Jeremy both shut their eyes, but I keep mine open to watch.

"Are you crazy Carina?" Jeremy shouts, grabbing my wrist and yanking me away as the light flashes in a wave past us and through the room. He buries my head in his chest so I see nothing as I feel a splash of air hit my back.

I pull away from him and am about to tell him off for grabbing me when I notice he is looking over my head with wide eyes. I turn around, though I know what I will see. A woman stands on the hospital floor, runes fading beneath her bare feet before they vanish completely. Unlike Rose when she turned into a bird, she appears clothed. She is young with blonde hair that waves back and forth on the way down her back.

"Myra," Mr. Wespurt breathes and the two of them rush to embrace.

"She looks different than I imagined," I say. She has a leather halo tightened down around her forehead and wears a plain brown dress that is loose and wide about her and flows gracefully with her movements. Earrings dance at her neck. She isn't wearing robes and she carries no wand. That is when I realize. She's a muggle.

"Leo's mum was Lovey," Jeremy says just to affirm that what he sees before his eyes is indeed true. Aside from her hair, she looks just like Leo, or should I say Leo looks just like her. They've the same rigid face and pale complexion. They were carved from the same stone.

"Why else do you think she was so fond of me?" I smile.

He looks at me disbelievingly. "You mean you knew?"

I shake my head. "Just today. Rose told me. When she was a finch, Mrs. Wespurt told her everything that happened. She just didn't know about the runes, that they could change her back."

"What did happen?"

Leo's mother cuts from her oscillation to look around at us.

"Luna," she says, walking over to Mrs. Scamander. The woman breathes heavily in her bed, sweat dripping off of her ears from her forehead. Lorcan walks over to the bed and sits beside Lysander.

"She'll be alright," Leo's father tells us.

"How do you know?" Lysander asks.

"Once the spell is done, it can do no more harm to the person who's under it. Certainly, it will take her time to recover, but soon it will be no more than a fever."

"But that's not possible," Jeremy says, still staring at the spot in which the runes had once been. "You left Leo and your husband."

Myra Wespurt knits her eyebrows. "Left? I left temporarily to live at Hogwarts. Because I was an owl and I needed to watch over my son. If anything happened to him or the Pearl, I was to report it immediately."

"And you didn't think to tell Leo that you were doing this?"

"We couldn't," Mr. Wespurt says.

"He's an Unspeakable," I realize. "That's why you couldn't tell Leo about his mother. She's involved somehow with the Living Pearl and you're sworn to not repeat information about it."

He nodded. "You see, that's why I didn't respond to your letters. I've been jumping around quite a bit lately, really all over the world tracking down Jagobin and his followers." All over the world. It was funny. I always imagined Leo's father at home. That seems like a strange thought now that I think about it, but he never seemed like someone to be so actively involved, especially now that I look at him, so small and strange-looking. He is shorter than his wife, not by much, but it's still noticeable.

"That doesn't excuse that you told him she left your family!" Jeremy shouts.

Mr. and Mrs. Wespurt exchange glances.

"I told Leo that his mother was gone on a vacation for a time," Mr. Wespurt says. "We both travel occasionally for work, but I knew I couldn't tell Leo it was because of her job. He knows many of her work friends and if he was to ask where she was, he would know I was lying, so I purposely kept it vague. I said she was staying with some family and sight-seeing."

"That isn't what Leo said," Jeremy tells them. "He seems to have the impression she left for good."

"Oh no," Myra sighs, running her fingers down her scalp so I could see dark lines of hair under her blonde locks. She looks up at her husband. "This is our fault. We'd been fighting relentlessly when Leo came home from Hogwarts over the summer. He must've thought it had been going on all year."

Leo's father looked back at us. "The Department of Mysteries has always housed the Pearl, ever since Baxg's death. He had given it to a wizard who housed him for many years, but the wizard happened to pass away with no benefactors so his property was inherited by the Ministry of Magic. When we discovered we had the Living Pearl, it was clearly a delicate situation for those in charge didn't want to hand it over to the goblins as they would have wanted, yet we couldn't let anyone know that we had it in our possession. The Unspeakables were given the information to protect in case the Pearl was ever needed."

"But someone betrayed the Ministry to the black market and won a fortune," Myra continues. "Once Jagobin discovered the Pearl's location, we knew it wouldn't be safe in the Department of Mysteries."

"Understand, at the time, we didn't know who had betrayed us, but we did know that he would swipe the Pearl for himself once he learned its specific location within the department which only I knew. I want to take the Pearl somewhere to keep it safe, but I would lose my job if I stole the Pearl from the Department and we weren't permitted to move it."

"I couldn't let such a powerful object just sit there, so I stole it."

"Which wasn't necessary. We had placed traps around the Pearl to protect it."

"The very traps you set would have been shut down by any Unspeakable! It wasn't safe in the Department of Mysteries anymore. I needed to take it."

"We would have caught him."

"Not before the Pearl went missing."

"I understand your reasoning," I say, interrupting the two before their argument becomes too heated. "What happened then?"

"I ran," Myra tells us. "I took the Living Pearl and fled from the country, going as far as I could, but I quickly learned that hardly anywhere is safe from goblins. They found me in every place I went. Finally, I went to Luna to try and get help, but they had tracked where my flight was headed and met me there. Then, I was turned into a bird and had no choice but to turn back and go home. I had no idea what became of Luna. It all happened so fast."

"But they didn't get the Pearl?" Jeremy asked.

Myra smiles. "I didn't have it. I passed it off to my husband before I left the country. Jagobin is able to track magical objects. He just assumed the one I was carrying was the Living Pearl. In reality, it was a prophesy record I had swiped before I left."

"Leo was going to Hogwarts just the following day and I was desperate to find a hiding space for the Pearl," Mr. Wespurt says. "What better way to hide something than on someone who has no idea they've got it? I knew it would be safe on Hogwarts grounds and by the time Leo returned home for Christmas, I would have discovered where to store it. In the meantime, I had my wife watching over the Living Pearl and Leo."

"And you were also watching over Leo," Myra says, looking me over as she adjusts to the returned smaller blue eyes set into her head instead of the wide disks that sat in a sea of feathers. "If it weren't for you, he would be dead. You're a psychic who truly uses her powers nobly."

I'm not sure how to receive this praise. Usually, it's only through looks, not direct comments.

"But then why would they place an inheritor's curse on Mrs. Scamander?" I ask. "Why not just keep the information about how to free you from being an owl to yourself?"

Jeremy says, "Better question is why they bothered turning you into an owl at all and with such a complex spell. They could have easily transfigured you into a chair and left you there. In fact, they could have just killed you and been done with it. I doubt the magical authorities would have stressed over a muggle."

She exchanges glances with her husband and looks down. "Well, I can't say I know much about magic, so I'm not sure why they did what they did."

"Liar," I say, clearly and distinctly so she and her husband look up at me.

"Excuse me?" she responds, trying to sound authoritative so I'll back down. She fails.

"You know exactly what happened." I don't know how, but I know this is true.

"She's—." Jeremy stops at her glare and looks at me for reassurance. "Carina's right. You're keeping something to yourself."

"One way or the other, it doesn't matter," she says.

"Wrong," Jeremy says. "How can you not see it? Everything matters now. We need to know what you're hiding."

"It doesn't pertain to what's happening here," Mr. Wespurt says firmly.

"And if it does?" Jeremy asks.

"It is a personal matter," he affirms.

"So is all of this," he says. "You better run through your life with a fine-tooth comb because you two seem to be the ones whose lives are wrapped up by the Pearl more than anyone else and your son's well-being depends on you being completely truthful with us, so if you're sure that this has absolutely no effect on what's happening, you can keep your mouths shut, but otherwise SPIT IT OUT!"

"Please trust us on this," Myra tells us. "It isn't our secret to tell."

Jeremy walks out and down the hallway in frustration. I look one last time at Lorcan, Lysander, Nathan, and Mr. and Mrs. Wespurt by Luna Scamander's bed and ran to catch up with him in the hallway, strung with sterile white lights and lined in blue tile. I walked beside him.

"I know you're angry with Leo's parents. So am I," I tell him.

"Really? Did you have to watch Leo all this time thinking his mother had just cut out on him? Look at her, I almost wish she had."

I have to take a moment to process what he's said and realize he means her muggle robes. I've never taken Jeremy to be a purist, but I suppose he isn't really. He's just using it as a superficial way to blame her for what she's done.

"I know that what they did was horrible, but I don't think we should press them on this."

"It's obviously important!"

"I didn't say that it wasn't, but I don't think it's relevant in this moment. Trust me, Jeremy, the truth has a way of coming out."

"Yeah, after years of being hidden."

"Not when it comes to the Living Pearl. I tried for weeks to shake Leo from discovering me only to find that I couldn't. In the end, I had to come clean and tell him who and what I was. I had to tell him everything no matter how much it felt like I was laying my entrails out in front of him to dissect. The Living Pearl made that happen."

He slows his pace and looks over at me. "So Leo found you out because of the Living Pearl's ability to enhance natural capabilities?"

"He and Frieda are the only wizards who had ever remembered me before the Living Pearl began effecting the school and warping my curse. But you know that."

"Did you ever talk with anyone while you weren't remembered?"

"Of course. Constantly, especially with Rose and other Hufflepuffs. But not with you if that's what you're asking. Not even now that we sit next to one another." I neglect to mention that it was out of distaste.

He smiles. "I'm glad. I remember myself my first few years of Hogwarts and I don't think you would have liked him."

"The same goes for me, I'm afraid. Your younger years should never be used against you."

"Agreed. I'm glad we met when we were older." I pause, but say nothing, yet I am too late to hide and he stops and turns to me. "I knew it," he says, grinning. "We were kids! I wasn't crazy."

He waits and I have to smile. "You're not crazy."

"Merlin's beard, Carina!" he says. "My mother talks about you all of the time! 'Where's that old mate you used to have?' she says. And then I have no idea and neither of us think on it for long. Alone in the country with you all my childhood, I feel ashamed to have forgotten under that wretched curse."

I walk in silence as he talks, thinking about how things really ended between us. Should I tell him? Should I tell him that he forgot about me long before the curse? He was my first and only friend for so long. Part of me always thought the only reason he ever played with me as a child was because I was the only other child for miles, but now…He just likes me for who I am and nothing more. Could we be friends again? I feel a small seed of hope within me begin to germinate so one day it might grow over my heart and leaf like ivy. I have Leo and Rose and maybe even Scorpius now to be my friends. Before I never cared, but more and more I don't want to lose them. I want to hang on to this good feeling that's stretching inside of me, down my limbs, and loosening up its joints to walk in my body.

For a long while, we walk through the hospital hallways and just talk about this and that. I ask him if he noticed George in the Quidditch game and he tells me about the bludger blows she gave him and how he wished she was on the Gryffindor team. He eventually coaxes me to tell him that George threw the game. Though he is visibly disappointed, I say I'm still very impressed. The victory would have gone to them without her. He doesn't seem to care much, though he says to keep this between us. He wants also to get back in time for the party for it is bound to start soon. I promise to go with him for a spell.

After a time, we make it full-circle back to Luna Scamander's room and walk back inside, but something's wrong. When we walk in, Lysander and Mr. Wespurt both have their wands out. Lorcan and Luna are still incapacitated and Myra sits on the sidelines, powerless against a group of seven goblins. The one standing in the center of the crowd is visibly larger and more relaxed than the others. We freeze. There are too many for us to fight, especially with my less-than-average magical abilities.

"Step inside and don't make a sound," he says maliciously. The tang of his voice turns my back to gooseflesh and I wonder what things he's done to accomplish such a timbre. When we walk in, the door slams behind us.

"Jagobin tracked the runes that were used to free me," Myra tells us in low voice as the goblins turn on us. We're all stationed on one side of the room and it's only my guess what they intend on doing from here. My day has been empty from the end of the game and on for there is where my vision ended and all the rest of this is a mystery.

"I expected you to all get together eventually," he says, "but I'll admit I thought there'd be more of you."

"Well, Leo and Living Pearl aren't here," I say. "They're safe and sound back at Hogwarts."

"She's right," Mr. Wespurt confirms. "And if you so much as touch any one of us with magic, I'll contact the magical authorities faster than you can flick your finger." I sigh internally. I've never heard a more obvious lie.

Jagobin grins a wild, toothy grin and I suddenly start to lose confidence in everything we've just said. Leo hasn't followed us, has he? He wanted to come, but he wouldn't. He's not adventurous. He's smart. He wouldn't come unless someone goaded him and I left him with people who wouldn't let that happen.

Jagobin paces a few steps, looking at the ground beneath his feet. "What makes you think I'm here for the Living Pearl?" And he looks up, directly at me.