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Hermione looked stunned, staring at the animal corpse in disbelief, but showed no squeamishness as we got closer.
"You killed THAT?" she pointed her finger at the carcass in a completely uncivilized way.
"There wasn't much choice in the matter..."
"It's... It's the size of a train!"
"No, it's smaller. Okay, Hermione. There's no time. Here are all the records. Here's your Soul Catcher. You check, and I'll prepare the materials," I took the Soul Catcher and notebook with notes out of my bag and handed them to the girl.
"Good."
I began using my wand and various spells to clean up around the room, clearing away the crumbs and dust left over from the battle. After clearing most of the room, I found an undamaged spot in the middle of the room. There's plenty of room, and the ritual's graphic layout is five meters in diameter. The magically active ingredient for the drawing is my diluted blood and basilisk blood. It's interesting, though, that its heart and nearby vessels had more than forty liters of perfectly normal, not clotted blood in them during the cutting. Wonderful creature, the basilisk.
I dropped the bag on the floor and started pulling out everything I needed: jars of blood, a large neutral mixing pot, heart. It was gigantic in size, by the way. I mean, practically as big as me - knowingly bought a bag with an elongated neck.
I was a million percent sure about the calculations of the ritual. There were doubts: "Who could have "whispered" revelations to me? Absorbed parts of Voldemort? A diadem? Who knows." But after checking everything fifty times, I was sure it was right.
I went back to Hermione, who was diligently reading my notes under the light of the Lumos, sat down beside her, and waited.
"Seems right," she spoke but clearly hadn't finished checking yet. "It's hard without a calculator. How did you even calculate all this so quickly? It takes at least a couple of weeks to work out just the idea itself. And then there are the calculations, the translations, the adaptation to the position of the stars, the calculations again... How?"
"If I tell you, you'll just kill me, so you don't have to worry anymore," I found the strength to smile.
"Max, you... I get it. In the near future, I will thoroughly deal with Occlumency, and soon you will tell me everything. It's simply impossible to be tormented by ignorance and worries, imagining how you get involved in one misfortune worse than another!"
"Hermione. Time. I have a diagram to draw, and the full moon is in an hour."
"Max," the girl looked at me very concerned. "Do you realize how much of a risk you're taking?"
"Absolutely."
"Aren't you afraid of dying?"
"We will all be there. How we face Death depends on us, and I definitely will not be a werewolf."
"But... What if I was wrong about the Soul Catcher weave? Then..."
"You're not wrong," and I am sure of that too. I double-checked her work.
The girl only sighed and closed her notebook, and handed me the Soul Catcher, which I immediately put around my neck as an amulet.
"Everything is fine."
Nodding, I stood up and walked into the center of my chosen spot. The drawing of the ritual was in my mind, and all the calculations were lined up for the time "five minutes before the full moon." With the power of diadem, I projected the scheme around me, waved my wand, and ran it along my palm, releasing some blood and forming a small orb. With a gesture, I sent it into a large neutral cauldron. With a new gesture, I made the basilisk blood from the jars overflow into the cauldron, and with another gesture, stirred it.
A new wave of the wand and all the blood from the cauldron rushed in trickles upwards, circling over me. The crucial stage was to carve the ritual pattern into the floor with the blood while laying the blood in the carved scheme and channeling a bit of magic into it to fix the scheme. The scheme itself is so damn complicated. From the abundance of elements, lines, figures, runes, and signs of various shapes and thicknesses, it dazzles in the eyes, but it's calibrated to perfection. Will I ever stop reassuring myself, or not?
The process went on slowly and surely. Slow ... Too slow, but rushing was unacceptable. From the corner of my eye, I noted Hermione standing off to the side, clearly nervous, rubbing the sleeves of her warm sweater sticking out from under her jacket.
By the time I was done with the diagram, I could distinctly feel the full moon approaching. The minutes were counting. I grabbed the tip of the basilisk's tail with my telekinesis through my wand, pumped a lot of magic into the manipulation, and dragged it to the area of the circle reserved for my sacrifice. I moved the enormous heart to the same section - just enough to take up all the space.
"Tempus."
Six minutes to the full moon. I ran a glance over the drawing, made sure it was free of debris and other unwanted elements and looked at Hermione.
"I don't think you want to see that, and I'll have to take my clothes off, too."
"Let me figure out for myself what I want to see and what I don't."
"I hope the process of disintegrating my body wouldn't become your boggart. But, I warned you."
Quickly I began shedding my clothes, levitating them outside the circle. It was rather amusing to note from the corner of my eye the slightly crimson face of a girl who didn't know where to look and then the momentarily pale one. Well, yes, I seem to be a handsome boy. Muscles and stuff like that, and then "Bang!" - scars all over the right side, as if I had escaped from the jaws of a shark.
"Horrible..."
"Yeah?" I grinned with a questioning eyebrow. "I thought better of myself."
"I mean the scars. Did Professor Lupin really do that? They say werewolves don't remember what happens when they transform."
"Then why doesn't he look me in the eye or at me anymore?"