A Memorable Tale

39 | Unforgivable Until it's a Spider

What, are their eyes to shoot lasers?

"Well, I can certainly see why we're trying to keep them alive," Draco exclaimed sarcastically. "Who wouldn't want pets that can burn, sting, and bite all at once?"

While I hated how he was going about it, he sort of had a point.

What on earth did these things even do?

I was sure that, like other creatures, they had something useful about them, but I would have rather learned it when we knew what that useful thing was.

As we left, I advised Dean to go see Madam Pomfrey, and carried on to the dining hall.

"I got burned, see?" Michael shoved his hand into my face and I lowered it. "Michael, your hand is supposed to be red there! I'd be more concerned if it wasn't."

"Still..." Sue started wearily. "Doesn't it sometimes seem like Hagrid doesn't know what he's doing? I mean, even he said himself that he wasn't sure what the Skrewts did. I hate to say it, but Malfoy might be right."

"Draco is never right about anything," I spat with a roll of my eyes.

Padma furrowed her brow. "Are you okay?"

"What do you mean?"

"Did something happen between you and Draco?" Morag asked with her brows furrowed.

"What- no, nothing happened between me and Draco." More like, something happened between Draco and a hippogriff, which is basically the same thing.

"Anyways, I've got Muggle Studies - see you!"

•••

The next few days went on normally (well, as normal as you can get at Hogwarts) and then the first class of Defence Against the Dark Arts with Moody came around.

"Scourgify." The frog guts under Neville's fingernails disappeared and I sighed. "That is the most disgusting detention I could possibly imagine."

"I heard a sixth year had to clean up hippogriff dung once," Seamus decided to add.

"Second most disgusting detention."

We entered the Defence Against the Dark Arts class and I took a seat beside Neville before pulling out my books.

"You can put this away, those books," Moody snarled as if he had a personal qualm with them. "You won't need them."

While I was quite flabbergasted at the thought of someone not needing books, I put my books back into my bag and leaned forward on the unusually empty desk in front of me.

"Right then," he said. "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?"

His large blue eye settled on me and I looked around, hoping someone would notice and ask about it.

"But you're behind - very behind - on dealing with curses. So I'm here to bring you up to scratch on what wizards can do to each other." His blue eye finally moved away. "Miss Brown, if you could pay attention."

Lavender blushed and slowly put away something she was hiding under the desk. Could he see through solid objects or something?

He finally turned his entire head towards me, not bothering to hide the fact that he was staring. "You're Caelum's kid, aren't you?"

"Yeah?"

"Professor Lupin told me about you - very bright, he said. Take after your father, hm?"

"I dunno."