A Broken Inheritance

Chapter 64: The Room of Requirements

Chapter 64: The Room of Requirements

By Thursday, they'd memorised the backs of half the eighth years' heads.

They'd trailed Rory Dunn from Herbology to the Astronomy Tower. They'd timed the Prewett twins' detours from the Great Hall down to the second. They'd even followed Thalia Bell into a broom cupboard, where she'd only raised a brow, crossed her arms, and waited in silence until they'd awkwardly backed out and bolted. They were nothing if not persistent.

James flopped back onto his dormitory bed, arms behind his head, eyes fixed on the canopy above.

"Nothing. Again."

Sirius kicked off his boots and slumped onto the bed opposite. "They're ghosts."

"Worse," Remus muttered, flipping through a notebook. "They're organised ghosts."

"Bit of a change for us," Sirius said with a grin. "We're usually the ghosts."

Sirius sat up, one eyebrow raised. "You're weirdly present this week."

James glanced at him. "What?"

"In the dorm," Sirius clarified, his tone deliberately light. "Weirdly present."

James frowned. "So?"

"So," Sirius said, smirking, "you haven't done the whole long-walk-down-the-hallway thing in days."

James gave him a flat look. "She doesn't miss my lingering presence, trust me."

Sirius raised a brow. "You sure?"

"She doesn't need me right now," James said, too flat, too fast.

Sirius studied him for a beat, then just said, "Whatever you say, mate."

Remus cleared his throat pointedly. "Focus. Please."

Sirius kicked one foot in the air. "We are focused. We've narrowed it down to what, five?"

"Four confirmed, one likely," Remus said, flipping a page with a thumb. "The Prewetts. Rory Dunn. Thalia Bell. And maybe, Marlene McKinnon."

"Yeah," Sirius nodded, remembering the vicious precision of her counters. "She's not practicing on her own."

"And her brothers are confirmed too," James added.

"Fabian and Gideon Prewett," Remus supplied absently. "And they're not actually her brothers. Cousins."

James shrugged. "Close enough."

The three of them leaned over the Marauder's Map, spread out like a military diagram on the trunk between their beds. Dots floated across the parchment—some labelled, some blurred, some blinking in and out like faulty stars.

Remus frowned, still tracking dots on the map. "But it doesn't add up. They don't sleep in the same places. They're not in the library. They don't meet in classrooms. Sometimes they're—look—"

He pointed at Rory's dot, which flickered twice and then vanished off the edge of the page.

James leaned in. "How is that possible?"

"Point is," Remus continued, "we've followed their paths on the map. Every time they get close to the seventh floor, they vanish."

"Glitch," Sirius muttered.

"Not a glitch," Remus said, tapping his wand against the parchment. "They're not apparating, and they're not disillusioned. Look, see this stretch?"

He pointed to a jagged piece of corridor that looped around an empty stretch of wall.