Butterflies

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The Order of The Phoenix

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"Honestly boys get up!" Cassie said to Harry and Ron the next morning. Everyone was awake and downstairs ready to help Mrs. Weasley remove the doxys from the drawing-room. "Mrs. Weasley says your breakfast is in the kitchen and then she needs you in the drawing-room, there are loads more doxys than she thought and she's found a nest of dead puffskeins under the sofa. Hurry up!"

Cassie walked out of their room and made her way down to the drawing-room, a long, high-ceilinged room on the first floor with olive-green walls covered in dirty tapestries. The carpet exhaled little clouds of dust every time someone put their foot on it and the long, moss-green velvet curtains were buzzing as though swarming with invisible bees. Cassie grabbed her cloth from Hermione and put it around her nose and mouth, then took her large bottle of black liquid with a nozzle at the end from the table.

Harry and Ron joined them about half an hour later and they both looked surprised when they saw the others.

"Cover your faces and take a spray," Mrs. Weasley said to Harry and Ron the moment she saw them, pointing to two more bottles of black liquid standing on a spindle-legged table. "It's Doxycide. I've never seen an infestation this bad, what that house-elf's been doing for the last ten years. . . ."

Hermione's face was half concealed by a tea towel but Cassie distinctly saw her throw a reproachful look at Mrs. Weasley.

"Kreacher's really old, he probably couldn't manage. . . ."

"You'd be surprised what Kreacher can manage when he wants to, Hermione," said Sirius, who had just entered the room carrying a bloodstained bag of what appeared to be dead rats. "I've just been feeding Buckbeak," he added, in reply to Harry's enquiring look. "I keep him upstairs in my mother's bedroom. Anyway, this writing desk. . . ."

He dropped the bag of rats into an armchair, then bent over to examine the locked cabinet which, Harper now noticed for the first time, was shaking slightly.

"Well, Molly, I'm pretty sure this is a boggart," said Sirius, peering through the keyhole, "but perhaps we ought to let Mad-Eye have a shifty at it before we let it out. Knowing my mother, it could be something much worse."

"Right you are, Sirius," said Mrs. Weasley.

They were both speaking in carefully light, polite voices that told Cassie quite plainly that neither had forgotten their disagreement of the night before. A loud, clanging bell sounded from downstairs, followed at once by the cacophony of screams and wails that had been triggered the previous night by Tonks knocking over the umbrella stand.

"I keep telling them not to ring the doorbell!" said Sirius exasperatedly, hurrying out of the room. They heard him thundering clown the stairs as Mrs. Black's screeches echoed up through the house once more: "Stains of dishonour, filthy half-breeds, blood traitors, children of flith. . . ."

"Close the door, please, Cassie," said Mrs. Weasley. Cassie nodded, flicked her left wrist to the side and the door closed. 

Mrs. Weasley bent over to check the page on doxys in Gilderoy Lockhart's Guide to Household Pests, which was lying open on the sofa while Cassie and Hermione exchanged grins.

"Right, you lot, you need to be careful, because doxys bite and their teeth are poisonous. I've got a bottle of antidote here, but I'd rather nobody needed it." 

She straightened up, positioned herself squarely in front of the curtains and beckoned them all forward.

"When I say the word, start spraying immediately," she said. "They'll come flying out at us, I expect, but it says on the sprays one good squirt will paralyse them. When they're immobilised, just throw them in this bucket."