Certain Dark Things || Book Two

xxxvii. burning day

She worried about Hermione and Elara; just because the monster had already attacked this evening didn't mean it wouldn't attack again—and Elara and Hermione must have left the library by now. Were they back in the common room, safe with the others? Or were they still in the corridors? Harriet swallowed down her trepidation and prodded her knee, keeping her eyes fixed on the growing bruise and clotting scrape.

A clock chimed the hour.

There were a great many things in the Headmaster's office Harriet hadn't had the time or the wits to inspect before. Restless and in need of a distraction, she hopped to her feet and took the chance to investigate now, pacing along the wall with its wood shelves and shorter tables laden with strange devices. Harriet thought Professor Dumbledore might have more books than the library crammed into the shelves, several protected behind locked cabinet doors, and though she wondered what kind of texts a wizard like Dumbledore might collect and seal away, she didn't touch the doors.

A set of stairs led to an upper platform, an area behind the professor's large desk that held more portraits upon the curved wall, more shelves, and several shut doors. She considered going up those steps but didn't, because Harriet decided those doors must lead to Professor Dumbledore's quarters and it felt terribly rude for her to go poking her nose about where it didn't belong.

Harriet's eyes moved over the tables with their silver instruments and came to rest upon a familiar pile of glass.

She shivered when she stopped before the Mirror of Erised's fragments. Professor Dumbledore had the largest pieces floating in the air, like a bizarre, string-less Muggle mobile, shifting ever so slightly when Harriet approached and her breath caught the edges. Looking into the shards, Harriet didn't know what she expected to see—maybe nothing at all, given Quirrell had shattered the dodgy thing when he tried to kill her—but individual images moved within the fragments. She peered closer.

It took Harriet a moment to realize the mirror still worked—at least, after a fashion. Instead of displaying her single greatest desire, however, each chunk and sliver showed smaller wants and wishes, big, small, important, and petty alike. There Harriet saw herself having a lie-in, and there she saw her mum's face, and here laid her favorite sweater with the top button fixed, and that bit over there showed all the Petrified victims back on their feet. Harriet didn't know what to look at first, and the effect was disorientating.

She still hated that mirror.

Harriet wandered back to her seat, and by the time Dumbledore arrived, the young witch was crouched near the hearth, Livius coiled on the warmed bricks and irked with her for not letting him bite the owner of the voice they'd heard in the corridor.

"Good evening," Professor Dumbledore said, smiling at her before his gaze lowered to the indignant snake. "Oh, dear. I thought we had an agreement about your familiar staying in the dorms, Harriet?"

Frick. Standing, Harriet fussed with her sleeves and tried to meet his gaze, but she couldn't bring herself to look past the Headmaster's crooked nose. "I'm—sorry, Headmaster. I'm always really careful, and it's not all the time! But I—I just...feel safer when I have Livi."

Professor Dumbledore sighed, and then simply nodded, looking tired in the dying fire's dull red glow. "I understand. We will have to discuss this further at another time, but for now...."

He gestured her over to the desk and they left Livi behind, Harriet taking one of the smaller seats meant for guests and students, and Dumbledore sat next to her. The Headmaster's heavy gaze once more fixed upon Harriet, and she fidgeted in her seat. Did the Headmaster think she had something to do with Finch-Fletchley? Did anyone else know she'd been there? How did the monster move about so quickly?