Emily Potter - Book 2 - The Chamber of Secrets

Chapter 5

He heard a soft gasp escape her brother, Emily turned and saw him frantically lying down in his bed, the sheets pulled up to his chin. Harry mimicked her to do the same, "Someone else is here!" He whispered. She turned back to the house-elf who had then disappeared with a snap of their fingers. Emily turned her back against the door and buried herself under the sheets with a pillow to her chest. She felt her eyelids screw themselves shut in prayer, please let it be anything but that creature from the dungeons. Please.

"Heavens – what's happened, Albus?" A woman's voice worryingly asked as a herd of footsteps came into the hospital wing. Emily's heart soared in relief to the point that she had to hold back herself from springing up on her feet and shouting for her Aunt Minerva. A muffled shuffle of robes brushing along the floor was a dead giveaway that the headmaster was staggeringly close to their beds. "Another student has been attacked, Minerva," Dumbledore explained grimly. "Petrified."

Emily cursed herself for pretending to sleep under the covers, she could not sneak a peek into the scene, but she tried her very best to pick up whatever the professors had to say. The solemn click of deputy headmistress' heels sounded through the air, "Do you think he managed to take a picture of his attacker?"

Picture? As soon as that hint had been dropped, Emily concluded that the petrified body was indeed Colin Creevey. He's only a first-year... Poor boy. Her palms began to sweat the tighter she held onto the corner of her blanket, her pulse skyrocketing when she waited for Dumbledore to walk over to Colin's bed. The footsteps stopped and were replaced with the sound of hard plastic and metal being crunched. It must have been badly damaged, no doubt.

To her ears, it sounded like a can being crushed by a trash compactor. Emily assumed that the headmaster had picked it up to make all this noise, he must be checking the film or something. After the last clanking sound of metal, a loud, busted click erupted followed by a soft poof. The scent of melted plastic and sour smoke wafted in the air, and it prompted Madam Pomfrey to sigh and perform a cleaning charm to cleanse the air.

"Destroyed – All of it," Dumbledore muttered, returning the obliterated camera on the nightstand.

"Albus, who could possibly be behind these attacks?" A distressed Madam Pomfrey digressed, coughing from the camera's smoke.

"The question is not who, dear Poppy," He answered her. "It is how."

~

Emily did not know what to expect from her body when it began to grow back the bones in her leg. It was a challenge to not wake up every hour from the sensation of her leg jolting or her foot suddenly kicking in the air, the pain, however, was somewhat tolerable. It was mostly sore in her ankle and knee, sometimes in her toes. She began to wonder if a growing fetus was able to feel the tingling ache that came along with assembling its skeleton and organs, but soon Emily pummelled herself down a wormhole of thoughts that painfully led her to acknowledge the fact that she now had a part of her that was not grown by her mother.

Alright, now I'm just being irrational. Emily turned to see the squirming figure under the sheets of the next bed over, she yanked one of the pillows from the foot of her bed and hurled it at her brother, "Morning, Harry."

A low grunt was heard from the moving lump under the blanket. Harry surfaced from the layers of pillows and carefully set them aside, fluffing each one as he greeted his sister. "Morning – how's your leg?"

Emily shrugged, timidly patting her knee which sent a jolt of lightning up to her hip. "It's nearly completely grown, I think. How's your arm?"

She watched as her brother jiggle his arm that was restrained in its wrap. Considered that it was smaller in comparison to the assortment of bones that Emily had to grow back, Harry was close to being fully healed. "Much better now, I have to say." He commented, jumping out of his bed to walk over to his sister's so that he could help her sit up and let her feet touch the ground.