2 | CONFESSIONS° HARRY POTTER

7 | KATIE BELL

ACT FOUR, grief
CHAPTER SEVEN, katie bell

Dumbledore's absence was noticeable. Iris caught sight of the headmaster only twice over the next few weeks. He rarely appeared at meals anymore. Iris went to find Harry in order to speak to him about Dumbledore but she was pleasantly surprised when he sought her out instead.

Halfway through October came their first trip of the term toHogsmeade. Harry was pacing back and forth in the dungeons when Iris appeared behind him. He jumped, not having heard her.

"What are you doing down here?" She asked amusedly at his surprised expression. She had just come from the Owlery where she had sent her mum a letter. The contents were pretty basic since they included basic information about how classes were going, how her friends and Oliver were, how Harry was . . .

"Well, our first trip of the year to Hogsmeade is coming up and I was wondering if you wanted to go together?" Harry asked. He recalled asking Iris a similar question last year so he added, "On a date. Alone."

Iris raised an eyebrow and nodded her head.

"Yeah, that'd be great." She agreed. Harry let out a sigh like he had been holding in a breath since she approached him.

Iris  woke early on the morning of the trip, which was provingstormy, and whiled away the time until breakfast by reading The Black Book. The spells she was reading about were different from the others. It was almost as though the book included darker spells the more she read on. There were curses, hexs, jinxes, and spells that specialized in torturing another person. Iris lingered a bit on a spell causing one's blood to boil from the inside out, a particularly dark thought crossing her mind as the face of Bellatrix Lestrange crossed her mind and she snapped the book shut.

The room was quiet since everyone had already gotten up by the time she closed the book until a faint hissing sound filled the room and Veles slithered out from underneath Daphne's bed. Iris moved forward to look at Veles.

"I didn't call you this time." Iris said, switching easily to Parseltongue as though she spoke it regularly. She rubbed at her eyes from the lack of sleep she had gotten the previous night.

"Not on purpose, no." Veles informed her. She eyed the book beside Iris and looked at Iris's appearance. "Perhaps you should stop reading that book so much?"

Iris's stomach dropped and she fiddled with the Black family ring on her finger.

"Why? What's wrong with it?" Iris asked curiously.

"It can have a certain . . . effect . . . on the reader if you consume too much of the book's content." Veles said cautiously. "Caliope didn't want just anyone flipping through the book carelessly. She was a firm believer that learning about dark magic takes time. She believed it was an art form not to be learned in one night so if anyone reads the book too much then the reader changes. It's subtle at first but nevertheless . . ."

"What kind of changes?" Iris asked. She tucked the book away in her chest, deciding to heed the snake's advice.

"It takes away pieces of yourself. Little by little . . . bit by bit . . . It's why you look so bad now." Veles said.

"Thanks." Iris said sarcastically. She rolled her eyes at the snake but thought about what Veles was saying. Iris picked up the mirror by Willa's bed and looked into it. She had noticed that she looked paler than usual but she contributed that to the weather. Her cheeks looked more sunken and sharper but she always thought that was because she was getting older. It was her eyes that made her realize that Veles was right. They were duller, and not just in the color, but they looked as though the light and the life had been sucked right out of them. "I don't understand how I'm supposed to learn dark magic if the one book that can help me also hurts me in the process."