Taylor got dragged into the post game celebration with the rest of the school. She jeered and boo’ed the green trickle as they passed, making faces and sticking her tongue at them. There were no more sneers or hisses, just mumbled cursing.
It was especially nice, because back at the Quidditch changing room, Marcus Flint, Slytherin team captain and all around bully, looked about to eat Malfoy alive.
“…you had the Snitch right above your head, but you couldn’t take your eyes off the boy-who-lived.” Flint towered over the small blond boy, his face very ugly.
Draco scowled angrily too.
He opened and closed his mouth a few times, then stormed off without saying anything, looking ready to do something stupid. Not a few minutes off the Quidditch pitch he was yelling at people and calling them names and threatening with daddy this and daddy that. For a moment, Taylor almost let it pass, but that sentiment vanished when Malfoy crossed paths with Hufflepuff Pippa Rosewood.
Pippa was carrying a heavy potted plant, its branches extending most of the corridor.
“Get out of my way, you filthy mudblood.”
Pippa stopped, trying to poke her head from behind the leaves.
Malfoy pulled his wand and angled it between the foliage, snarling a curse.
Poor Pippa Rosewood let out a yelp and fell, the potted plant crashing down with her. The pot broke when it landed, dirt spraying everywhere. One of her hands covered a stinging hex mark on her face.
Immediately, Taylor spread the silk on Draco’s path.
He tripped and fell on the dirt spread by the broken pot. The hidden pixies near the ceiling dropped mud on his head, and the spiders scurried away with his wand toward a corner nearby, out of sight.
“Get your comeuppance, you jerk!” Pippa shouted, before getting up and running away crying.
Malfoy got up, mud covered head redder than a tomato. He looked frantically about until he found his wand, then he stormed off as well, towards the dungeons.
On Harry’s side of events, predictably, things didn’t go well. Lockhart fumbled his spell and instead of fixing Harry’s bones, he did away with them entirely, leaving his arm looking like a very gross meat… something. Colin Creevy kept snapping pictures all the while and Lockhart posed for them, even while messing up Harry’s arm.
Hero-Harry was taken to the Hospital Wing, and Madam Ponfrey went off in a fit of rage.
“You should have come straight to me!” she growled, holding up the sad, limp remainder of what, half an hour before, had been a working arm. “I can mend bones in a second – but growing them back –”
More surprisingly was that even after that fumble, Hermione still defended the DADA professor. Which made no sense at all. Hermione was one of the smartest people in the castle; Lockhart hadn’t taught them anything in two months. The math wasn’t hard.
Taylor was starting to think Hermione had a celebrity crush on the pompous wizard.
The celebratory mood carried into lunch, where the headmaster announced news regarding the house cup.
“For a spectacular feat of flying, Fifty points to Gryffindor,” the headmaster had said, which put Gryffindor in first place for the house cup, followed by Slytherin, Hufflepuff and lastly Ravenclaw. That had subdued the mood in the Ravenclaw’s table, especially with older students throwing dirty glances Taylor’s way, but the yelling and cheering from Gryffindor and Hufflepuff soon infected Ravenclaw as well and the moment passed.
Slytherins, on the other hand, hissed at everyone.
It was all very silly.
In the afternoon and evening, there was barely any peaceful place in the common room to work on homework or spell practice. Late that the evening, after dinner, Taylor snuck into a nearby classroom for a few minutes of quiet practice. She just felt guilty if she didn’t practice at least a few minutes here and there.
In her letter home that night, she gushed about Quidditch and how fun it was to watch, and how dangerous it was and that she wanted to play, but she was horrible at flying and didn’t want to risk a fall.
She wrote all of that and more, still buzzing like she’d swallowed a whole bag of popping candy.
Taylor woke up that night with a heavy headache and certain there was something very wrong. Her head hurt like it was a piece of crumpled metal that a burly blacksmith wanted to beat into knife shape.
Along with the pain, all the spiders in the castle were buckling against her control. A quick mental tally told her more than enough.
There was another petrified victim in the hospital wing with the school faculty crowding around him. Apparently, Collin Creevy had sneaked out to visit Harry in the hospital wing and got caught by the heir. His camera had been fried by whatever attacked him.
Malfoy was still awake, huddled in an empty corner of the common room of his house. His nose was puffy and his eyes were red. What the hell. Was he crying?
Another crier was Ginny. Her diary lay thrown in one of the corners of the bed, open to blank pages. She had her face stuffed on the pillows, but wracking sobs shook her whole body.
A pair of prefects were awake, far from where the attack had happened. Percy and Penny. They didn’t seem aware of the attack yet, too busy snogging inside an empty classroom.
Ew.
Penny had horrible tastes. Percy, of all people? They didn’t mesh well at all. Penny was so pretty and charismatic and Percy was so… stuffy.
But aside from crying students, snogging prefects, and worried faculty members, there was another puzzling mystery: she couldn’t find Hagrid anywhere. His hut was empty; Fang and the crossbow were missing. She could guess where he was: the Forbidden Forest, most likely. It was very suspicious. Was Hagrid related to the attack somehow? Or was he just unlucky to be away when another student was attacked? Had he unleashed the horror? Was the horror in the Forbidden Forest? She was more than willing to believe in Luna’s impression of the man, but the timing was just too coincidental.
Maybe he’d been trying to stop the horror and failed? That would explain his skittish behaviour.
There was another point that Taylor almost missed.
A swath of her bugs had died. One thousand, four hundred and seventy three bugs, among spiders, mosquitoes, gnats and many others had simply ceased. All starting from the same corridor where Mrs Norris had been attacked, up until the fourth floor corridor where Collin had been found.
Taylor completed the path in her mind. That corridor led to the Gryffindor’s Tower and dormitory entrance.
Had the heir been trying to kill someone there? Was the target Hermione Granger, like Draco hoped? She wasn’t the only non-magical in the dormitories, but her association with Harry made her stand out more than others. Or maybe, they were just trying to attack as many students as possible? No, that didn’t make any sense. If that had been the heir aim, stopping after petrifying Collin made no sense.
And why did her bugs die, while Collin and Mrs Norris were petrified? Was the difference their size?
There were so many questions and not enough answers.
Luna turned and snuggled closer, mumbling something. Taylor leaned in, trying to listen.
“… no wrackspurts, they get eaten near her head …”
Taylor grinned. God, she loved Luna, wrackspurts and all. She hadn’t had a friend like this before.
Sleep wouldn’t come for the rest of the night. The painful headache and trying to find out what happened made sure of that. At some point, closer to dawn, Hagrid returned. Like Taylor had thought, he’d been in the Forbidden Forest.
The whole situation didn’t make much sense. The attack had been in the castle, but Taylor didn’t know when, or if Hagrid had even been present. A possibility was that he’d been trying to stop the horror, then managed to drag it into the forest. That sounded wild even to Taylor. How was he alive if he wasn’t controlling the horror? And who left that message if Hagrid had been trying to prevent the attack, instead of causing it? There had been no other student out of place inside the castle, no empty beds aside from the night patrols.
And her spiders were still trying to flee. On a hunch, she let go of a bunch of them, and watched where they went.
The spiders scurried away in a frantic line, out of the castle, through the grounds, until they left her range at the edges of the Forbidden Forest.
Taylor had a sinking feeling that if she wanted to solve this mystery, she’d have to do something very stupid, like sneak out of the castle and into the forest on her own.
That Sunday morning added more details to the heir’s mystery. Harry tracked his friends to the female bathroom cubicle where a moaning ghost lived, then spilled a lot of secrets, because he thought no one was listening.
The house elf she saw during the match was called Dobby. He wasn’t one of the castle’s own, but came to ‘save’ Harry from some dastardly plot. He’d been the one to lock Harry and Ron out on the train platform, he’d been the one to fix the Bludger to chase Harry.
Taylor wasn’t sure if that new information complicated things.
If Dobby was talking about the chamber and the horror, then he knew about the attacks even before the school year started. It meant then, that someone had been planning this for a long time, and the person behind it was probably Dobby’s master.
If that was the case, it wasn’t Hagrid. The gentle giant had no house elf servants.
Over the next few days, without any new lead on the heir or the horror, Taylor was forced to admit she’d have to do the stupid thing. Hagrid still refused to talk to her, she wasn’t close to finding out who Dobby’s master was (not that she could just start asking everyone about it).
She could just dump all of this onto the school’s faculty lap: Harry’s mysterious voice that only he could hear, Dobby’s partial confession about a plan, Hagrid’s strange behaviour. A scribbled note delivered by bugs to Flitwick or the headmaster’s office would push that out of her hands. Only, would it really? Complaining about Snape to Flitwick made things worse for everyone. She didn’t want to attract the headmaster’s attention if she could avoid it, and an unknown letter showing up in his office telling him things that no student was supposed to know about would put him on high alert.
Taylor did not want the most powerful wizard of Britain on high alert and on the lookout for her and her secrets.
So, the stupid.
It was Friday night. Luna, Mira and Harriet were already asleep.
Taylor had been keeping an eye on Hagrid, and he’d just got ready to leave his hut, crossbow in hand. She squeezed out of bed, doing her best to not disturb Luna, got into her winter wools, and took a meandering path around the castle, away from patrolling prefects, tattletale portraits and obsessed caretakers.
Outside, the cold mid November air made her skin prickle. The sky was cloudy, but she could still see a few stars here and there.
Taylor gathered all her pixies and as many bugs that could survive in the cold weather, then marched toward the forest.