Obliviate My Heart {Book 2}

13. Unforgivable

The next two days passed without great incident, unless you counted Neville melting his sixth cauldron in Potions.  Snape, who seemed to have attained new levels of vindictiveness over the summer, gave Nevihle detention, and Neville returned from it in a state of nervous collapse, having been made to disembowel a barrel full of horned toads.

"You know why Snape's in such a foul mood, don't you?" said Ron to Harry as they watched Hermione teaching Neville a Scouring Charm to remove the frog guts from under his fingernails.

"Yeah, Moody." Harry said grimly.

 Everybody was was anybody knew that Snape was desperate to be the Defence teacher. It was fairly obvious that Snape would either stare at Moody as if he wanted to kill him, or just blank him.

"I reckon Snape's a bit scared of him, you know," Harry said thoughtfully.

"Imagine if Moody turned Snape into a horned toad," said Ron, his eyes misting over, "and bounced him all around his dungeon..."

Everybody seemed to be looking forward to Moody's lesson, apart from Cole and I. Draco was traumatized by the whole experience, and still had people snickering at him in the corridors.

I was just filled with loathing that everybody was praising Moody for humiliating and destroying Draco's social stand in Hogwarts. And Cole just thought that anybody who controlled people via magic was a douche-bag, so that was the extent of his argument on the matter.

Everybody religiously queued outside the classroom ten minutes early on Thursday, and I shot dark looks at those who were overly excited for the lesson. Hermione was the only person who was almost late, she had to run to make the bell.

"Been in the -"

"Library." Gennie finished her sentence for her. "C'mon, quick, or we won't get decent seats."

The four of them hurried into four chairs right in front of the teacher's desk. Cole and I rolled our eyes, and sat at a two-seated desk at the side of them.

"They are fan-girling over him, how pathetic." Cole muttered, taking out his copy of The Dark Forces: A Guide to Self-Protection, and waited, unusually quiet.

"Are you alright, Cole?" I asked, nudging him. He looked unusually pale. "Are you feeling dizzy."

"I'm not going to keel over, if that's what your thinking." Cole smiled, but it looked a forced one.

Then we heard Moody's distinctive clunking footsteps coming down the corridor, and he entered the room, looking as strange and frightening as ever. They could just see his clawed, wooden foot protruding from underneath his robes.

"You can put those away," he growled, stumping over to his desk and sitting down, "those books. You won't need them."

We returned the books to their bags, Ron looking excited.

Moody took out a register, shook his long mane of grizzled gray hair out of his twisted and scarred face, and began to call out names, his normal eye moving steadily down the list while his magical eye swiveled around, fixing upon each student as he or she answered. It creeped me out, as he looked me up and down.

"Right then," he said, when the last person had declared themselves present, "I've had a letter from Professor Lupin about this class. Seems you've had a pretty thorough grounding in tackling Dark creatures - you've covered boggarts, Red Caps, hinkypunks, grindylows, Kappas, and werewolves, is that right?"

There was a general murmur of agreement.

"But you're behind - very behind - on dealing with curses," said Moody. "So I'm here to bring you up to scratch on what wizards can do to each other. I've got one year to teach you how to deal with Dark -"