Certain Dark Things || Book Three

xvi. magical creatures

"Stop looking at the doors."

A guilty flush rose in Hermione's cheeks when Elara said those words because she had, in fact, been staring at the Great Hall doors. She'd been staring at the doors from the moment she sat down to breakfast, and now she returned to stirring her cold porridge around in its bowl and pretended nothing was amiss. "I'm not staring. I'm simply checking."

"Continuously checking. Which could also be construed as staring."

Glowering, Hermione gave up fussing with her food and leaned forward. "I'm just concerned," she hissed to Elara across the table. "Shouldn't she be here by now?"

"Pomfrey probably fed her in the infirmary," Elara replied, sipping a cup of orange juice, the picture of cool, unruffled ease. "You needn't be so worried."

"How can I not be worried? What if she stumbled into another secret chamber or—or oubliette, or bloody hidden trench?"

Elara arched a brow. "If Harriet managed to find certain doom before breakfast, we'll invest in a leash or something. Either we will, or Snape."

Hermione glanced toward the High Table at the mention of the Potions Master and found him absent from his seat. Instead, there was an empty chair between Professor Slytherin and the new History of Magic instructor. As Hermione watched, Slytherin lifted his red eyes from his untouched tea to look the drab wizard over, then turned away, unimpressed.

Hermione concentrated on her breakfast and her patience was rewarded when one of the Great Hall's doors creaked open far enough to admit Harriet. Snape arrived seconds after, a foul look on his face as Harriet darted forward, head down, and all but ran to the Slytherin table—not that it spared her the attention of the amassed horde. She didn't have time to sit down before Malfoy called out, "Poor little Potter, did you get frightened by the big bad Dementors and faint?" Accipto Lestrange cackled and Lucian Bole must have muttered something obscene that Hermione didn't catch, as the older Slytherin boys continued to howl with laughter.

"Bugger off, Bole!" Harriet snarled. "And you too, Malfoy! I didn't faint!" Given she flushed scarlet to her roots, Hermione wagered she had, in fact, fainted.

"Oh, Harriet," she muttered as the other witch settled, furious and scowling, leaning her elbows on the table. "Are you all right? We were terribly frightened. We saw that new History of Magic professor—Professor Lupin—carrying you to the castle and we didn't know what to think—."

"I'm fine!" Harriet stabbed the serving spoon into a bowl of scrambled eggs and heaped them on her plate, though she showed little interest in actually eating them. "I didn't faint. That—that thing startled me and I fell out of the carriage, hitting my stupid head on the ruddy ground." She glared along the table toward Malfoy, who caught her eye and swooned with a dramatic hand placed on his brow. "First bloody night here and they made me stay in the infirmary despite there being nothing wrong with me. I missed the whole feast!"

"Well, you didn't miss much. Just the Sorting and Professor Lupin's introduction."

"Did Dumbledore talk about what in the hell that thing was? Because neither Snape nor Pomfrey would tell me anything."

Hermione glanced again at the High Table. Professor Dumbledore savored his morning tea despite the teetering stack of letters being dropped near his plate by impatient owls. As Hermione watched, the wizard spoke and a house-elf appeared, gathered up the notes, and disappeared once more. Snape assumed his seat, pointedly ignoring the new wizard seated to his left.

"It was a Dementor, one of the guards from Azkaban. They're outside the grounds on the Ministry's orders." Nervous dread swelled in Hermione's chest as she remembered her own encounter with the monster and she couldn't stop the sudden stream of words coming out of her mouth. "A Dementor is an amortal non-being, a very dangerous Dark creature not even recognized on the quintuple-ex beast scale—which is what a Horned Serpent is rated, by the way. Known wizard-killers and un-domesticated beings—."