Whoa," said Harriet, blinking numbly.
Lockhart's dazzling grin tried to stun her. Well, it wasn't so much the one grin as the several dozen of them. She would really have liked some sunglasses.
"They must have finished it," Hermione said in hushed awe.
They stood gazing at the enormous mural, if mural was the word Harriet wanted, of Lockhart. It spanned the wall between Lavender's and Parvati's beds, teeming with photographs of Lockhart snipped out of colorful magazines mostly, but some black and white newspapers, too. He grinned, winked, beamed, glittered, twinkled and posed from every angle.
"I wonder if this is what he looks like to a fly," Harriet said as a dozen different Lockharts checked their hair and flashed their teeth and blew kisses. At each other.
Hermione giggled, pink in the face.
Harriet checked to make sure Lavender and Parvati weren't in the room, because Hermione wouldn't talk about it if they were. She had outlined Lockhart's classes on her schedule in little hearts and memorized all his books (well, she memorized everything she read, honestly), but the whole time Lavender and Parvati had been working on their mural Hermione had sniffed and looked as if she had no more idea than Harriet that Lockhart's secret ambition was to rid the world of evil and market his own range of hair-care potions.
"Why do you like him?" Harriet asked. She started to say He's sort of a loony but realized it was the sort of thing Ron would say and Hermione would only clam up and hide behind Gadding with Ghouls.
Hermione went a shade of deep pink that Lockhart had worn last Tuesday. "Who says I like him?" she asked, her eyes darting around as if to check, like Harriet, that they were alone except for the dozens of posing Lockharts.
"Nobody says," Harriet said, "but I'd have to be Petrified not to notice."
Hermione looked like she wanted to deny it, but then she gave up and went more deeply pink. "How can you not like him? You've read his books!"
"Actually, I've tried not to," Harriet said. "They're sort of... rummy."
"But everything he's done!" Hermione said, staring at Harriet as if she couldn't believe her ears. "The way he saved that entire monastery in Tibet from the ice zombies! And that village in Armenia from a whole werewolf pack, he did that single-handedly!"
"Well, yeah, all that stuff's really brave," Harriet said truthfully. "But I mean . . . " She watched a Lockhart in pale sea foam green wink at a lilac-wearing Lockhart in the picture caddy-corner to him, who flashed his teeth. "I just can't imagine Lockhart doing it."
"He wrote the books, Harriet."
Harriet gave it up. Lockhart had written the books. She just thought it was weird that he'd done all that amazing stuff but couldn't handle some pixies, and besides, Professor McGonagall and Snape really seemed to hate him. That was normal for Snape, who everyone knew wanted the Defense position, but McGonagall? They looked disgusted whenever he talked to them, like Lockhart smelled as bad as a troll. And they would look at each other with clear Can you believe this? expressions whenever he checked his hair in the silverware at dinner.
Someone knocked on their dorm room door. It turned out to be Ginny, looking pale with dark circles under her eyes.
"There you are!" Harriet said, pulling her into the room. Ginny's hands were like ice. "Where've you been?"
"We tried to find you at lunch to see where you were," Hermione said, her eyebrows creasing at the sight of Ginny's unhealthy color. "And before dinner, too, you didn't come to either—"
"But no one could tell us where you'd gone," Harriet finished.
"Oh," Ginny mumbled.
For a moment, Ginny looked blank—not like she didn't understand, but like she wasn't there at all, like nothing was looking out from behind her eyes. A chill crawled up Harriet's back like the spiders they'd seen fleeing from Moaning Myrtle's bathroom.
Then Ginny rubbed her eyes. "I . . . I was asleep . . . I think . . . "
"You think?" Hermione asked sharply. When Harriet poked her, she looked apologetic and softened her tone. "I just mean—have you been to Madam Pomfrey?"
"She gave me Pepper Up," Ginny said wearily. "I just felt the same."
"The same like what?" Harriet asked.
"Tired," Ginny said. "And . . . cold, kind of." She shivered.
Harriet traded a look with Hermione, whose eyebrows looked troubled and thinky, like she didn't like the sound of this anymore than Harriet did. It was almost December in a drafty castle in north Scotland, but Gryffindor tower was so warm in the winter that sometimes you had to go walk around the chilly corridors just to cool down, especially if Fred and George were letting off fireworks under the chairs of people studying for end of term exams. And the girls' dorm had a nice fire going right now. She and Hermione had thrown off their itchy jumpers and were just wearing their shirts.
They sat Ginny in front of the fire and wrapped her in blankets. Harriet wondered if students could call the house-elves like Snape had done, or if that was a teachers-only privilege. She thought Ginny would do better for some hot chocolate.
"Are you homesick, Ginny?" Hermione asked in a kind voice.
"No," Ginny said. "Honestly, it was more lonely last year when it was just me and Mum and Dad. I mean, sometimes it was heaven, not having brothers around, but weird, you know?"
Hermione clearly didn't, but she was an only child. "Well, then, is it Mrs. Norris?" she asked, more kindly still.
Ginny, whose knee was pressed up against Harriet's, went as hard and stiff as stone.
"Mrs. Norris?" she said faintly.
"Yes." Hermione stared. "Ginny, what's the matter?"
Ginny's hand crept up to her mouth. She looked like she'd seen a ghost—not one of the Hogwarts' ghosts, but something dreadful, like a piece of a nightmare.
"I . . . " she whispered, shaking all over. She stood up, the blankets falling off her. She stared at both Harriet and Hermione, her lower lip trembling, and then ran out of the room, crashing into Lavender and Parvati, who were just coming back in.
"Merlin! Watch where you're going!" Lavender squealed, but Ginny was already gone.
"What happened?" Parvati asked them, eyes wide.
Harriet looked at Hermione, who seemed equally mystified.
"We've really got no idea," Harriet said.
"What do you think it was about?" Hermione whispered to Harriet later that night. They'd pulled the hangings shut around Harriet's bed and the covers up over their heads, because Lavender got cranky if they kept her up whispering, even though she and Parvati sometimes talked and giggled together for hours.
"Maybe she knows something about Mrs. Norris," Harriet whispered, staring up at the crimson darkness of her canopy. "Maybe . . . maybe she can hear the voice, too."
She couldn't see Hermione's face, but she could imagine her expression as clear as the moonlight outside the window. When she was thinking hard about something that bothered her, her eyebrows drew down and her mouth thinned.
"Have you heard it at all past those two times?" she whispered.
Harriet shook her head, then remembered Hermione couldn't see her. "No. But . . . maybe different people can hear it at different times."
Hermione lapsed into a Thinking Silence. It was thicker than her Reading Silence, but not cold like her Disapproving Silence.
"Well," she whispered at last. "You should get some sleep. You've that Quidditch match against Slytherin in the morning."
"And Oliver'll want me to go at it like I'm fighting Slytherin's monster," Harriet yawned.
As it happened, it wasn't Slytherin's monster but a Bludger that Harriet had to fight off. She just barely managed it without breaking her neck, but it was a near thing. After hitting the mud, dizzy in the knowledge that they'd bloody won and Draco Malfoy could take that and tell it to Slytherin's monster, she fainted.
She woke up to glittering teeth.
"Oh no," she moaned, "not you."
"Doesn't know what she's saying," Lockhart told someone. Harriet made out blurs of red and gold around her, probably a crowd of Gryffindors. "Not to worry, Harriet, I'm going to fix your arm."
"No!" Harriet tried to pull it away from him, but the pain surged like a tidal wave and her vision went green and black. She thought she'd been going to say something else but she had no idea what it could have been—
Dimly, she heard a squelch and a thud.
"—gawping idiots," snarled a familiar voice. "Get back, get out of the—Miss Potter?"
"I didn't do it," Harriet said thickly, wondering if she was dreaming, because it seemed like Snape had come into her nightmare to blame her for something else. She blinked, trying to see, but her glasses were coated with mud.
Then something lovely happened to her arm—something that made it hurt less—and she was lifted gently out of the mud and onto something soft and stretcher-like.
"I thought I told you to get—" she heard Snape snarling from somewhere close-by. "If you must, Miss Granger—Weasley, move out of the way, where do you think I'm going, you daft boy—"
Harriet found out later, after Madam Pomfrey had dosed her with a pain potion and fixed her broken arm, that Snape had, according to Angelina and Katie, kneed Lockhart in the back and tread him into the mud; magicked her onto a stretcher and carted her up to the hospital wing, followed by Hermione, Ron, and the entire Gryffindor Quidditch team; and that Filch had just about had an apoplectic fit at all the mud they'd tracked through the castle (but Snape had sent him packing with a pithy remark that Fred said he'd treasure always).
Harriet dearly wished she could have seen Snape knock Lockhart into the mud, which Fred, George and Ron assured her had been an experience worth remembering. She was sure he'd also saved her arm from some horrible fate, like Lockhart turning it into an elephant's trunk.
"I'm sure he wouldn't have done anything of the sort," Hermione said a bit shrilly as they left the hospital wing to clean up. Even though she and Ron hadn't been flying through the rain, they'd gotten plenty wet and filthy kneeling over Harriet in the mud.
"I wouldn't want that nutter anywhere near me with a wand," Ron said. "Every time he gets it out, disaster strikes."
"Oh, rubbish!" Hermione said, pink-cheeked, as they stopped where the edge of the hallway met the empty drop in the vault of staircases, to wait for one of the flights to swing over. "Look at all the things he's done!"
"He says he's done," Ron said. "Oh, hurry up," he told the staircase, which was stuck waiting for a couple of Hufflepuffs to gather up their things; one of their bags had split open and they were scrambling to save everything from rolling off the stairs into the long, long drop of nothing below. "I'm starving. . ."
"Of course he's done everything he says he has!" Hermione snapped.
Harriet was only half paying attention to their row, though, because something nearby was rattling. Then it went CRASH. She looked up to see a suit of armor toppling at her, the axe swinging down. Hermione cried out, but Harriet dodged backward, neatly out of the way - and felt her foot slip off into nothing -
They watched the box rattle across the floor as the Bludger fought to break out.
"I always check the balls against foul play," Hooch told Severus and Minerva above the shuffling and thumping. "There was nothing wrong with this one. Bludgers always fight."
"Except that clearly," Severus said coldly, "there was something wrong with it."
"I checked it before and after," Hooch insisted with a dirty look. "Go on, then, have at it. If it'll set your mind at rest."
Minerva unlocked the box and they both ran diagnostic spells over the thing while Hooch stood with her arms folded, looking like a local police chief having his work inspected by Scotland Yard in the smug yet offended knowledge that the interfering detective wasn't going to find anything. And indeed, even Severus's most sensitive Dark scans came up negative. To his magic, the Bludger was faultless.
And yet it had followed Lily's daughter across the Quidditch pitch for over an hour, screaming through the rain-whipped air, until her arm had snapped so hard he'd heard the break from the teachers' stands. He could still see her plummeting toward the ground, hanging onto her broom by nothing more than her knees. All for a fucking Snitch—
"House-elf," he snapped.
Hooch blinked as a house-elf appeared in her cluttered little office amidst the Quidditch bric-a-brac.
"Severus, what in Godric's—" Minerva started, but Severus ignored her and pointed at the Bludger in its box, which had jerked its way across the floor and was now banging metallically against a file cabinet.
"Tell me if this Bludger bears any mark of house-elf magic," he told the elf, which he thought was probably female.
She bowed and went over to the box, putting her hands on it, and the Bludger fell eerily still and silent. She stroked her hands over the Bludger's curve and tilted her head as if listening, her ears standing out from her head.
"Yes, Professor Snape Sir," she squeaked. When she released the Bludger, it immediately started shaking again. "But it is not a Hogwarts' elf, Professor Sir."
"Thank you," Severus said, and with a bow she disappeared like mist in a gale.
"House-elf magic?" Minerva asked him in a tone of voice that had an old ring of Severus Snape You Will Tell Me This Instant Why It Is After Curfew And You Are Not In Your Common Room to it. "Severus, what's the meaning of this?"
"I suggest you ask the Headmaster," he said in a way calculated to make her tail bristle, and swept out without a backwards glance at Hooch. But beneath that, he was more baffled than before. If Lucius's house-elf wanted to keep the girl safe from whatever Lucius was unleashing at Hogwarts, why in God's name would he try to kill her?
As he gained the entrance hall, he heard something swishing close behind him. "Severus Snape!" Minerva barked, now in tone of a Fifty Points From Slytherin And See Me After Class. He forced his legs to keep walking, although he turned his head slightly to show that he'd heard, and raised his eyebrows as she hove alongside.
"Yes, what is it?" he asked coolly, and thought he was lucky she wasn't transformed or he'd have had unsheathed claws coming at his face.
"You will cease to think you can emulate Albus this instant!" she said, red spots in her cheeks. "I won't have two of you on the grounds, so help me, Severus—one is almost more than a saint can handle!"
Wasn't that the truth—and if there were any saints on staff, he and Minerva would miss the short list by a mile. Still, he said, "You know how the Headmaster treasures his wheels within wheels."
"Oh, certainly," Minerva scoffed. "But I do not. And I agreed with you, if you will remember, that the Quidditch game ought to be stopped. I was in Hooch's office, investigating that infernal Bludger, while Albus is off polishing his wheels within wheels. So you will tell me this instant what house-elf magic on that Bludger means, or so help me . . . "
Gryffindors never finished their threats. "If you must know," he said coolly, knowing it would infuriate her, "it's—"
But that time he was the one who didn't finish. A noise cut him off from somewhere not too distant, somewhere overhead: a faint crash, and then a scream—
He and Minerva looked up. They'd come to the vault of staircases, stretching from the ground floor to the height of the castle . . . and something was plummeting through the air down toward them, something small and black—
His heart jolted in horror as the girl bounced off one of the moving balustrades and spun down through the air—Minerva cried out, and the ground was rushing up—