Under Your Spell

Tying Up Loose Ends

"Harry, come out, please! It's Sirius! You're safe!" Harry approached the door slowly, his hand wrapped around the door handle. He began to turn it, his heart pushing gallons of adrenalin through his veins. Harry could hear his heart thumping in his ears. "Harry!" At the sound of Sirius' voice, Harry wrenched the door open, but before he could take in his surroundings, someone grabbed the back of his robes, and everything went black.

They appeared on a field, wet, cold and shivering. Ethel let go of Harry's robes, and he dropped to the ground, sprawled in the mud. His eyes burned while they adjusted to the bright grey sky, and it took Harry a moment to realise what had just happened. The anger came to him like a white-hot poker through his head. He stumbled upright, advancing on Ethel, who seemed strangely calm, and was fiddling with her hair.

"What the hell did you do that for?!" He yelled, blood pounding in his ears. Harry reached into his pockets before realising, that, yes, Ethel still had his wand. 

Ethel looked up boldly, searing Harry with her solemn gaze. 

"That wasn't Sirius, Harry," she remarked sadly. "That was a boggart." 

Hermione looked up from where she was sat on the ground next to Ron. 

"It's true, Harry," she remarked quietly.

"That's ludicrous!" Exploded Harry. "Boggarts take the form of your worst fear! How would you know it was a Boggart?" Hermione and Ethel glanced at each other. 

"As soon as you disapparated with Ethel, it turned into a giant spider." Hermione nodded towards Ron, who had not spoken since their arrival, and was sitting on the grass, his face rather pale. "Scared Ron out of his mind. They sent the Boggart in to trap you, Harry, just like they did before in the Department of Mysteries..." Harry winced at the memory - he did not wish to remember the night of Sirius' death. "...They wanted you to come out of hiding. By the time we disapparated, the Death Eaters were already in the house." Ethel nodded in agreement.

"They've been following you since you appeared the other night, Harry. I watched you from the house. They kept themselves hidden from you with disillusionment charms, and waited. I didn't see what happened after you went into the house, but I knew you were in grave danger. They obviously knew you were going to be there."

Harry remembered McGonagall setting the attic alight, and the ominous whooomph! of the tinder-dry paper catching fire from McGonagall's exploding spell. He winced at the memory of so many precious documents igniting, and the wall of heat that blistered his skin and burned at the backs of his eyes the second before disapparation. 

"McGonagall knew they were watching us!" Harry yelled, the idea dropping into his head so suddenly, it made him jump. "They were watching us at Privet Drive just before we left, and she knew that they followed us to here. She set fire to the attic, so they would think that we had lost whatever we came for..." Harry trailed off. "But she picked up something before we left so she knew that everything else in the attic was useless. The Death Eaters came afterwards, when we disapparated, and extinguished the fire. They looked for whatever it was she had taken, but we had already gone, so they've been watching to see whether we'd come back, and we did..." The realisation began to sink in.

"So what do we do now?" Hermione asked anxiously. "We can't go back, it's too dangerous. As the letter told us, the Death Eaters are re-forming in Malfoy Manor as we speak. They'll become stronger than ever, especially without Voldemort's command. Kingsley's in St. Mungo's, and Cornelius Fudge is dead."

"But why?" Harry wondered aloud. "Fudge's been out of power for years. He retired into hiding after his resignation over the rise of Voldemort, and he refused to have anything more to do with the Ministry or Wizarding Politics. As far as everyone else was concerned, he had vanished off the face of the Earth. What would the Death Eaters want with him?"

There was a silence.

"Perhaps we had better ask the one that's standing right over... there," whispered Hermione.