"I'm the fun one." Jinx's teeth flashed like a fox's before a kill. "And I just saved Lumpy's butt, so you're welcome."

Her eyes, gleaming like sapphires, flicked between Harry and the Dursleys with the glee of someone watching a fireworks show seconds before detonation. She stood with the vibration of an electric wire, buzzing with unchecked energy as she hopped off the armrest, spinning in a motion of someone who just barely acknowledged gravity.

"Harry!" Aunt Petunia's bony fingers curled against her chest, nails pressing into her skin like talons. "Who is this—this person, and why is she in my house?"

Harry's stomach coiled.

His exhaustion sat on his shoulders like wet cement, pressing every breath out in short, tight bursts. He rubbed a hand down his face, dragging away sweat and the lingering ice of the dementor's presence.

"She followed me." He sighed. "I couldn't exactly stop her."

"I don't follow, Brilliant." Jinx waggled a finger at him. "I tag along. Big difference."

Aunt Petunia looked at him. "Harry!"

"You should probably focus on Lumpy." Jinx's gaze flickered down to where Dudley lay sprawled like a mound of meat and frost-stiffened fabric. "Get him some thing warm. Hot cocoa, maybe? Or soup. Soup's good for almost dying."

Uncle Vernon got up. "Get out."

"Vernon…" Aunt Petunia gulped. "Vernon, be careful, she's got a—"

"Get out of my house!" Uncle Vernon slammed his fist into the couch's armrest. "Right now!"

Uncle Vernon's beady eyes had locked onto Jinx, his breaths coming hot and fast, each one lifting his chest with barely controlled indignation. His face darkened from blotchy purple to an unhealthy shade of crimson, his mustache quivering like a cornered beast.

"Vernon…" Aunt Petunia, still crouching next to Dudley, put her arm gently on Uncle Vernon's leg. "Vernon, please calm down, she has a gun…"

"I don't care!" Vernon clenched his jaw. "I said get out!"

A sick, oppressive tension strangled the room.

The walls closed in, the floral wallpaper suffocating, the weight of Petunia's ornamental clutter pressing down on Harry's ribs like an iron cage. The air stank of polished wood and overcooked meatloaf.

Harry had known Vernon was stupid, but he had no idea he was this stupid.

Jinx stopped mid twirl.

The rhythmic tap of the metal tips of her boots vanished. The grin that had been stretched across her face—mocking, irreverent, electric—froze. Her eyes flickered toward Vernon, and for a moment, Harry could swear they pulsed as if there was some magic in them. Something alive and far too big for her small, wiry frame.

Harry inhaled. "Jinx…"

The air in the living room turned still.

Not into the natural stillness of an awkward pause but into the way the world locked into place before a lightning strike. The walls, adorned with their too-perfectly arranged family portraits and dustless knickknacks, stopped closing in. Even the clock on the mantle, which had always ticked in the background, quieted.

"Whatever you're thinking of doing…" Harry shook his head. "Don't. We'll leave. I won't abandon you."

Jinx stared at Uncle Vernon.

Harry palmed his wand.

Uncle Vernon had roared many times before. His anger and spat threats had loomed over Harry's childhood like a charging bull. It had loomed over the whole neighborhood. He was used to getting what he wanted.

This was different.

Uncle Vernon was trying to throw his weight at someone who did not move, did not flinch, did not acknowledge the rules of the world as he understood them. He was trying to intimidate someone who stood in front of a dementor and didn't show an ounce of fear or hesitation.

"You know…" Jinx's voice curled into a syrup-thick smoke from a fire about to devour those surrounding it. "I don't like it when people yell at me."

No. No, no, no—this was bad.

"Jinx, I'm serious." His fingers clenched around his wand, slick with sweat. "Stop it."

He needed to step forward.

He needed to do something before this spiraled. Damn the ban on underage use of magic. Damn the Statute of Secrecy. In a situation like this, a Stupefy was completely valid. His feet were rooted to the carpet, though. His arms weighed more than lead or iron. He just couldn't lift his wand. Because, no matter how menacingly Jinx looked at Vernon, she had saved Harry's life. She was dangerous, but she wasn't a monster. She—

She unslung Pow-Pow from her back.

The minigun hummed as its barrels swirled, A low, thrumming vibration, deep in the floorboards, running like an electric current up through Harry's bones. Like a heart beginning to beat faster, building, waiting, eager.

It wasn't magic, but it might as well have been.

Vernon's face darkened to a shade that wasn't human, veins bulging in his thick neck, sweat blooming at his temples. His beady eyes—pig-like and glistening with rage—snapped from Jinx's face to the weapon in her hands. His stomach strained against the buttons of his shirt as he jabbed a finger at her.

"You dare—you dare threaten me in my own home? I'll—"

"Vernon, stop!" Aunt Petunia looked at Uncle Vernon then at the barrels of Jinx's minigun. "Think of Dudley!"

Uncle Vernon, of course, stepped forward with his fists clenched. "I'll have you thrown in—"

The minigun's roar split the world apart.

It howled in a deafening, metallic cacophony that exploded through the living room with the fury of a storm unchained. The rotating barrels spun in a blur, the grinding whir sprinting like mechanical predator let loose. Sparks spat from its core like miniature supernovas, each flare a sudden, violent illumination of the chaos unleashed.

The walls trembled.

The house would never have heard a sound like this before. It would've known the hiss of disapproving whispers, the sharp slap of a hand against a table, the low, guttural growl of Vernon's voice when something displeased him. This… This was primal. It was violence turned into music. Destruction given a pulse.

Harry stumbled back.

His fingers clenched around his wand, but what spell could possibly stop this? There was no magic in his arsenal that could pull a bullet from the air, no incantation that could turn back time and stop Jinx from pulling the trigger.

The acrid stink of gunpowder filled the room, burning the back of his throat, coating his tongue with something bitter and metallic. The air tasted of iron and fire, of violence still hanging in the air like an unfinished thought.

Uncle Vernon choked.

His chest jerked back, the impact stealing his breath. His massive frame stumbled. His arms flailed flailing uselessly for purchase. It was almost absurd—almost comical—the way such an enormous man toppled like a felled oak.

But there was no humor in the way he hit the floor.

No humor in the way the couch armrest burst apart in a spray of shredded fabric and fractured wood, stuffing spilling out like entrails. No humor in the way the thud of Uncle Vernon's body hitting the ground reverberated through the room with the finality of a funeral bell. The gurgling sound that followed wasn't human. It wasn't rage, or words, or anything living. It was wet, choking, bubbling up from his throat in thick, unnatural spasms.

Harry couldn't breathe.

The blood came next. Dark. Too dark. A sluggish, viscous pool spreading across the polished floorboards, creeping outward in slow, deliberate tendrils, finding every imperfection in the wood, seeping into the tiny cracks and grooves, marking the house forever. The coppery tang of it hit Harry's nose, thick and raw, mingling with the gunpowder into something nauseatingly warm. It clung to his skin, to his lungs, drowning him in the scent of death before he could even process what had happened.

Blood. Uncle Vernon's blood. Jinx had—

"Vernon!" Aunt Petunia's scream broke with the jaggedness of shattered glass.

She clutched Dudley tighter, as if holding onto him could somehow anchor her to a world that still made sense. But there was no sense left here. There was no normality, no rules to cling to. The world had shifted, tilted into something unrecognizable, something wrong. Tears streaked down her face, streaking the fine powder of her carefully maintained appearance.

"What…" Her lips trembled. "What have you done?!"

Jinx let the minigun rest against her shoulder with a lazy flick of her wrist, the barrels still glowing faintly, smoke curling in slow, ghostly tendrils from the muzzle. The minigun let out one last mechanical whirr before falling into silence. Then Jinx tilted her head, staring down at Vernon's motionless form like she was studying something amusing.

"Huh."

The sound was light. Thoughtful. Detached.

She shifted her weight onto one foot, tapping a finger against her lips, her expression one of idle curiosity, like she was inspecting the aftermath of knocking over a glass of milk, not a man's lifeless body sprawled across the floor.

"He stopped yelling." She smiled. "That's better."

Harry's stomach lurched.

This wasn't happening. This wasn't happening. But the blood on the floor was real. The ringing in his ears was real. The weight of his wand in his hand, utterly useless, utterly meaningless, was real. Jinx's smile—small, content, like a child who had just finished an art project—was real.

Harry took a step back.

The world tilted under his feet, and Harry realized something cold, something deep, something that rooted itself in his chest like ice vines crawling up his ribs. He had never feared Jinx before. Not until now.

Now, though…

Now, the world was moving. Moving when Harry wasn't. Harry stood there unblinking, unbreathing, staring at the body sprawled across the living room floor. Vernon Dursley was dead. Dead. Like Cedric. Like Cedric. Like Cedric. The thought hit him like a hammer to the skull, pounding against his ribs, his throat, his lungs—shoving all the air out of him in one long, suffocating exhale.

It was as if his heart had stopped.

Like his brain had just… shut off, like an engine stalling in the dead of winter. There was too much happening, too much noise, too much wrong. Aunt Petunia's wails shrieked through the air, a keening, hysterical thing. It was thin and sharp, like a splintered bone. It scraped down his spine, but it was also distant. The walls had thickened, and the world was shrinking, collapsing, warping.

The copper tang of blood slithered through his nostrils until he was choking on it.

His wand was still in his hand, but his fingers had gone numb. He should move. Do something. Say something. He couldn't. His body wasn't his anymore. His arms were locked at his sides. His legs rooted to the floor. The room was tilting away from him, like gravity had shifted and he was about to slide into some unseen abyss. His breath stuttered in his throat, shallow and ragged, dragging in only enough air to keep him on the edge of suffocating.

Dead. Uncle Vernon was dead. Harry had to watch it happen again.

A blink, and Harry was back in the graveyard.

Cedric was there. Standing, Breathing. Smiling. Happy that he had just shared the victory with Harry. 'Kill the spare!' The flash of triumph in his eyes as he still held the cup vanishing to the sickly green light, and he was gone. Lifeless. Cold. His limbs sprawling at unnatural angles. His eyes staring into nothing. Glassy. Empty.

Just like Uncle Vernon.

Just like Cedric.

Just like Vernon.

No. No, this wasn't the same. It wasn't the same. Was it? Harry's stomach twisted, a black hole collapsing inside him. His mind was running in circles, looping, looping, looping, trying to tell him this was different, that Cedric hadn't deserved it, that Vernon—Vernon was awful, Vernon was cruel, Vernon had made his life hell—but he was still human.

And he was dead.

A death Harry hadn't stopped. Didn't fight. Didn't even see coming. Oh, he'd expected Jinx to do something nasty. Threaten, absolutely. Shoot to hit a limb or bone, definitely. Not this. Never this.

Harry's body swayed, but his feet didn't move.

He listed forward, the blood on the floor spreading, stretching, reaching for him, and his mind curled back on itself. He couldn't touch it. Couldn't let it reach him. He teetered on the edge of something vast and bottomless, some yawning chasm in his head that was widening, widening, widening—

His brain started to white out.

Not black. Not darkness. Just—white. A blank space. A void of nothing. Like his body had given up. Like it didn't want to be here anymore. Like it was checking out.

He dimly registered Jinx moving, but her presence was just another blurred shape on the edge of his consciousness. He barely noticed the way she looked at him—head tilted, studying him with that same unsettling curiosity, like she was trying to figure out if he'd break.

She'd killed Uncle Vernon.

CRACK!

The pain came first.

Blistering, sharp, like lightning splitting through the fog in his mind. Then came sound, loud and immediate—the echoing clap of skin meeting skin, the sting blooming across his cheek like fire snapping him back into his own body.

Harry's head jerked sideways. His vision blurred.

Then everything slammed back into place. The screaming, the smell of gunpowder and blood, the too-bright flicker of the overhead light stuttering in its fixture. His pulse pounded, his breath coming in sharp, ragged gasps as his brain reeled, staggering beneath the weight of reality crashing back in. Standing in front of him, grinning wide, was Jinx.

She'd slapped him. Hard.

Her palm was still raised, fingers slightly curled, as if she was considering whether or not to do it again. The force of it still burned against his skin, the imprint of her hand tingling hot and raw on his cheek.

"Hey, Brilliant." She rocked back on her heels. "You in there?"

Harry's stomach throbbed.

His whole body shook. His hands trembled at his sides, his lungs spasming as he struggled to pull air in, but it wasn't working, it wasn't—

Jinx grabbed his collar.

The movement was sharp, immediate, yanking him forward so abruptly his head spun. He found himself staring straight into her eyes—bright blue, burning, alive—and suddenly, the world wasn't so far away anymore. Her pupils were blown wide, her expression stretched thin between amusement and something watchful.

"There we go…" She tilted her head. "You were lookin' a little… I dunno. Not here."

Harry couldn't breathe. His ribs ached, his heartbeat hammering too fast, too hard, like it was trying to break out of his chest.

"You're breathing weird." Jinx watched him with the lazy curiosity of someone examining a wind-up toy that had started glitching. "You gonna pass out? 'Cause I dunno if I feel like catching you."

Harry jerked away from her grip, staggering backward. His trainers slid through something sticky—Uncle Vernon's blood—and his body recoiled before he even realized what he was doing. Too much. It was too much.

He barely made it to the corner of the room before he doubled over and threw up.

His stomach clenched violently, his body purging itself, his hands bracing against the wall as bile and acid burned up his throat. The taste was sharp, acrid, wrong, but his body didn't care. He gagged, chest heaving, the tremors running through him worsening with every retch.

His knees nearly buckled.

The world tilted.

His vision flickered black at the edges.

Jinx whistled. "Yikes. Didn't take you for the squeamish type."

Harry wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, his stomach still twisting with violent tremors. His breath came in sharp, ragged gasps, his lungs burning, his ribs aching like they'd been bound in iron. The copper stink of blood clung to the inside of his nose, thick and nauseating, mixing with the acrid burn of bile on his tongue.

He shook.

Not just from exhaustion, not just from the vomit still clinging to his teeth, but from the weight of it all. Uncle Vernon was dead. Jinx had killed him. The girl he brought to their house killed him.

Harry forced himself upright.

His knees still threatened to give out. His body was wrung-out, hollow, as if his magic had drained out of him along with everything else. But his fury—his sheer, burning rage—was there, bubbling up in his chest like magma rising toward the surface.

"You—" His voice broke, raw from the acid that had clawed its way up his throat. He coughed, then swallowed hard. "You—what the hell is wrong with you?"

Jinx blinked at him. "That's a loaded question, Brilliant. You gotta be more specific."

"You killed him! You—" He gestured wildly at Vernon's body, at the blood still spreading across the floor, at the smoking barrel of that monstrous weapon strapped to her back. "You murdered him!"

Jinx tilted her head. "And?"

"And—?" Harry's breathing hitched. "What do you mean and? You—you don't just—You don't just kill people!"

Jinx rolled her eyes. "Look, I did you a favor, okay? The guy was a grade-A jackass. You really gonna lose your mind over this?"

"You don't get to decide that! You don't kill people because you feel like it! Because it's convenient!"

"Oh, please." Jinx laughed and waved a dismissive hand. "Spare me the self-righteous breakdown. It's not like you actually cared about the guy."

"That's not the point!"

"Then what is the point?" Jinx hopped closer to him. "That I pulled the trigger instead of letting him threaten me? That I handled the situation?"

"You—"

A screech split the air.

Harry flinched, his eyes snapping upward just as something small and brown—an owl?—came barreling through the broken window. The birds swooped down, gliding among the wreckage Jinx had made, and dropped a letter onto Harry's feet before spiralling back to the window and vanishing into the darkness.

The envelope was the wrong color.

It was a deep, ugly shade of red. The same as… as when Mrs. Weasley sent one to Ron for the whole flying car incident. For a single moment, Harry didn't want to open it. Whoever had sent him the stupid Howler, now was not the time to be dealing with it.

Problem was, he couldn't leave it alone.

Ron had opened his in the middle of the Great Hall, and all the other guys had confirmed that something nasty would happen if you didn't. Harry didn't need more surprises tonight. Not after this. So, he snatched it off the floor with trembling hands.

He ripped it open with numb fingers.

The room shook with the force of the voice that erupted from the letter, yet the voice itself was cold, clipped, and mean in a way that made Harry want to throw up again. It was like listening to a frog that had decided it hated the world today speak.

Dear Mr. Potter,

We have received intelligence that you performed a Patronus Charm in a Muggle-inhabited area in the presence of a Muggle at 9:23 this evening. This constitutes a breach of the Decree for the Reasonable Restriction of Underage Sorcery (1875) and the International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy.

As such, you are hereby expelled from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. A representative from the Ministry will arrive shortly to confiscate your wand and oversee its destruction.

That's a wrap for Chapter 4!

Let me know what you liked and disliked, I love and appreciate all constructive criticism, especially since I always keep editing and improving these chapters. I would love to hear all your thoughts!

Check me out on p. a. t. r.e.o.n.. c.o.m. /TheStorySpinner (don't forget to remove the spaces and dots) for early releases of new chapters and bonus content.

The following chapters are already available there:

Chapter 5: The Edge of the Map

Chapter 6: Grand Theft Vernon

Chapter 7: Drive It Like You Stole It

Chapter 8: I Told You So

See you in Chapter 5!