Even at the best of times, Myrtle tended to be self absorbed and gloomy. Steven would have assumed that it was part of the ghostly existence, except that he'd met other ghosts at Hogwarts, and many of them were relatively cheerful.

He'd made a point of continuing to see her despite the dance lessons for the ball being over. Although he had a full schedule with classes and Quidditch lessons, he couldn't abandon someone he sometimes thought of as the loneliest ghost. None of Steven's friends liked Moaning Myrtle, not even Hermione, who sometimes reminded him so much of Connie that it made his chest hurt. It sometimes made him wonder how no one else could see what he could see.

When he looked at Snape or Myrtle, he saw someone in pain. They were good people deep down, but they lashed out because they didn't know how to deal with people in a better way.

Maybe it was because he'd been surrounded by pain for his entire life. His father had been grieving for his mother since the day she'd given up her form to create him. Pearl had been in love with her, along with a deep seated feeling of worthlessness because of what she was. Amethyst had hated herself, which was why she spent so much of her time in other forms.

Garnet had at least had her two selves to comfort each other, but they'd lost so many people over the centuries, and she'd known that she'd always be considered aberrant by her own people.

At first he'd been fooled; as a small child he hadn't known better, but as he'd gotten older he'd begun to see behind the cracks in the facade to the bitterness underneath. By the time Peridot had arrived he'd seen straight through her. She'd had a desperate need for approval, for importance, and she'd had some feelings of inferiority.

She'd tried to make herself artificially bigger as much to convince herself as anyone else using leg extenders and arm extenders.

So when he'd met the people here at Hogwarts, he'd immediately seen that they were all in pain. Harry had been raised by people who hate3d what he was. Hermione had been desperate to prove herself to people. Ron had been convinced that because his family was poor and he was the last and smallest male that he was inferior.

Neville had believed he was a squib and still thought that way sometimes, although the watermelon soldiers who now populated the Longbottom greenhouse helped a little.

Myrtle moaned because it was the only way she thought she could be heard. Yet the more she did it, the less anyone listened. She felt helpless and angry and it wasn't surprising that she sometimes lashed out, although Steven still didn't understand why she liked to hide in the toilets.

"It went right through my head," she was saying.

"It wasn't Peeves, was it?" Steven said. "I'll have Amethyst have a talk with him if it was."

Myrtle sniffed for a moment, then looked up at him. "I didn't see who it was, but I heard footsteps, so it was probably someone living."

"Then they probably didn't know you were there," Steven said. "Most living folks don't think about things living in the toilet."

Ever since learning about the basilisk and how it traveled, he'd had trouble not thinking about how the thing traveled. He'd had nightmares about going to the bathroom and having an unpleasant surprise, which had made him rather ginger when doing his abolutions.

"Well, she tried to stuff that down the toilet."

There was a soggy notebook underneath the sink, doubtlessly washed out when Myrtle had made the toilet flood.

It was empty, which begged the question of why someone would try to flush it down the toilet instead of using it or throwing it in the trash.

It apparently belonged to T.M. Riddle, which was not a name Steven recognized. He'd made an effort to get to know everyone in all the classes, even the Slytherins, and none of them were named Riddle.

He pulled out his wand and quickly cast a couple of spells. After he'd almost ruined a couple of Hermione's valuable books she'd insisted on drilling him on cleaning and drying charms until he knew them in his sleep.

"I'll find whoever threw this at you," he said to Myrtle. "If they meant to do it, I'll have them say they're sorry."

"And if they didn't mean to do it? She asked archly.

"They should still be sorry, but not as sorry as if they'd meant it," Steven said.

Myrtle said slowly, "I thought a heard a girl crying when she ran away."

"See? She was already sorry."

Hermione had turned herself into a cat person.

Amethyst hadn't stopped laughing, but Steven's own experiences with turning into a cat monster made him both sympathetic and simultaneously horrified.

Some sort of potion accident had turned Hermione into a part cat creature. According to Hermione, she was going to be stuck like this for a while.

There was a reason Professor Snape was so irritable about potions. They could be dangerous.

Cat Hermione turned the book over in her hands. "This book was made in muggle London, so the owner was probably a muggleborn. The book itself is old.

She did something with her wand as she opened the book. She tried several different things but nothing worked.

"I can't find any hidden writing, but that doesn't mean there isn't any," she said. "There may be spells upper classmen learn that I haven't heard about yet."

"Is there any way to track down who threw it in the toilet?"

"Fingerprints?" Hermione said. She shrugged. "The wizarding world is more concerned with hiding than investigating."

"You've already cleaned it, so there won't be any scent on it," she said. She lifted the book and sniffed. Apparently her cat nose was better than her human nose, but she shook her head.

"I'll bet if you carry it around and watch, you can see who gets upset. That's probably the one who threw it away."

It was the best plan he had. Fingerprints might be helpful, if he'd known the least thing about using them. But even if he had, Steven knew that he'd have to compare the fingerprints to all the suspects, which meant he'd have to compare the fingerprints of every female in Hogwarts. That was more than four hundred people, and he didn't have time considering his schedule.

So he'd started with his own house, as they were the easiest to access without rousing suspicion. No one had thought anything of the small book he was carrying around.

Next he'd tried the Ravenclaws, since they seemed to like books. Nothing there either.

After that, he'd spent time at breakfast with Harry and Ron. With Cat Hermione stuck in the infirmary, no one would suspect anything wrong with his comforting them.

He'd been watching for it, so he'd noticed when Ginny Weasely had paled when she'd seen the book.

After that, it was just a matter of finding a time when he could find her alone.

"Is this your book?" Steven asked quietly.

She stared at him, her eyes dark and haunted. Slowly she shook her head, but Steven wasn't convinced. There was something about the way that her eyes looked everywhere but the book that told him he was right.

"Why'd you throw it away?" he asked. He held the book out, and she took an unconscious step back.

Her eyes finally settled on the floor and she said, "It's bad."

"Bad?" he asked. He took a step toward her but lowered the book.

"You write in it, and it writes back."

Steven stared at the book, suddenly uneasy. He remembered an artifact that Garnet had insisted on destroying instead of just bubbling. It had been so dangerous that just taking a picture with his cell phone had resulted in her destroying it.

It had been powerful enough to turn a simple breakfast into something that had been dangerous. There were things he still couldn't eat for breakfast even after all this time.

If this book was something like that...

"What did it say?" He kept his voice gentle. If she thought he was judging her she'd stop talking.

"It pretends to be your friend at first," she said. "But the longer you talk to it, the more mean and hurtful things it starts saying."

She was silent for a long moment. "If you keep it long enough, you start losing time."

"Losing time?"

"You wake up places and don't remember how you got there. You find feathers or blood on you hands...and you know that you've done something horrible but you don't remember what."

Steven forced his expression to remain sympathetic. Was she saying she was the Heir of Slytherin, or rather that the book was, and that it was just working through her.

"It must have been hard to get rid of," he said.

She shuddered.

"This is something dark. We should take it to Snape or the Headmaster."

"You can't!" she said suddenly, desperately. "If Harry knew, he'd never..."

"Harry would understand," Steven said. "And if he doesn't, we'll make him understand."

He'd felt so smug about seeing everyone's pain, but he hadn't noticed Ginny's.

"The headmaster will know what to do," Steven said. "We'll go together."

There was a flickering as a form appeared between Steven and Ginny.

"That's not going to happen."

It looked like some kind of ghost, but more translucent and seemingly less real than most of the ghosts Steven had known.

"Who are you?"

"Tom Riddle," the figure said. He called out something in a loud hissing noise. "That's my book."

He was dressed in an old fashioned version of the Hogwarts uniform, and he looked as though he was about sixteen years old.

"It's earlier than I'd like, and I'm not sure where the girl got the strength to get rid of me, but this can be taken care of. Given another month and I'll be ready."

"What do you want with Ginny?" Steven asked.

"She's going to help me regain my true place in the world," the figure said. "A place where I can make the world safe for purebloods against abominations like you."

Ginny had gone still, her face blank and she was unmoving.

"She wrote about you, you know," the boy said. "She admired you, how you made friends so easily, and how you were always ready to protect your friends. As if there was any other measure of a man than strength."

"I'm strong," Steven said.

"You're not human, though. It's bad enough mating with a muggle, or even with a monster like a goblin or ogre. Your mother was just a rock. It's like a wizard mating with his wand...it's absurd."

"You sound a lot like Voldemort," Steven said.

The boy opened his mouth to respond, then looked up at something behind Steven. He smiled and then shrugged. "I'd tell you, but it's a moot point now."

Steven felt the breath of something big hit his back.