As soon as I got back to Hogwarts, I headed for the library. I headed to the very back by the floor-to-ceiling windows and sat down at one of the tables, facing the window. I'd originally wanted to sulk, but instead I was interested in the people walking around on the grounds below. Fred, George, and Lee Jordan messing around. Behind them, I saw Luke sprinting out to the woods. He was probably looking to do some training. He had to look suspicious going into the forest, but not as suspicious as he would with his sword out.
"Mouse." Malfoy's voice behind me made me jump.
"Seriously, dude?" I demanded. "Is it too much to ask to have ten minutes to sulk and stare out the window by myself?"
"I didn't really take you for a sulking and staring out the window kind of person."
"Well, today I am one."
"What's got your hippogriff in a cave?" Malfoy asked.
I froze. "What did you just say?"
"I asked you what's got your hippogriff in a —"
In a flash, I'd lunged from my chair and knocked Malfoy flat onto his back. "Who told you about him?"
Malfoy looked stunned. "What the hell, McKeon?"
"Who told you about Buckbeak?"
"What are you on about?" Malfoy tried to get up, but I pushed him back down with my foot.
"You asked me about a hippogriff in a cave."
"I was thinking about it and thought it was a good phrase!"
A cold tingle ran up my back. "You're lying."
"Okay, fine! You were thinking about it, and I thought it was a good catchphrase!"
"How did you know what I was thinking about?" I demanded. "What are you, some kind of mind..." I trailed off. A mind-reader.
"Sometimes I see pieces of what other people are thinking about," Malfoy said, but I was barely listening. "You were thinking about the hippogriff, and I saw it, and..."
"A mind-reader," I murmured.
"You're not even listening to me, are you?" Malfoy grumbled. "Could you at least let me —"
"Malfoy," I said suddenly. "Are you one of those... whatchamacallit... crap, I had it right there... Lego — leg —"
"Legilimens," Malfoy said, deep in thought.
"Yeah, one of those."
"A Legilimens," Malfoy repeated, still pondering. "I suppose... perhaps I could be..."
"You said you can see bits of what other people are thinking," I told him. "Sounds like mind-reader stuff to me."
"You're right," Malfoy said. "How could I not have realized...?"
"Tell me what I'm thinking about right now." As Malfoy looked at me, I thought extremely hard about Malfoy as a ferret.
It took a couple of seconds, but then Malfoy suddenly had an unimpressed look on his face. "Very funny, McKeon."
"Sweet Holy Hera!" I exclaimed, pointing excitedly at him. "You're a Legilimens!" Then the excitement faded. If he was a Legilimens, he could probably figure out what Harry was thinking about all the time. "You're a Legilimens."
"Not a very good one, though, unless I'm concentrating, I guess." He still seemed kind of excited about it, but his smile faded. "You can't tell anyone. Especially not my father."
"Well, I doubt I'd ever be in a position to — wait, Draco 'My Father Will Hear About This' Malfoy doesn't want his father to know that he can read people's minds? Dude, I'd've thought you of all people would want to brag about this to everyone!"
"Not about this," Malfoy said darkly.
I frowned. "Can I ask why?"
"You can ask, but I don't plan to answer it."
"Okay," I said. "Another time, maybe." I gave him a dry smile. "Guess we're keeping each other's secrets now."
"Guess we are." Malfoy frowned. "Can I get up now?"
"Oh, right."
By breakfast the next day, I was ready to forget about what had happened with Sirius yesterday, and I was grateful that Harry, Ron and Hermione didn't bring it up. When the post owls arrived, Hermione looked up eagerly; she seemed to be expecting something.
"Percy won't've had time to answer yet," said Ron. "We only sent Hedwig yesterday."
I wasn't sure what he meant, but I decided not to ask.
"No, it's not that," said Hermione. "I've taken out a subscription to the Daily Prophet. I'm getting sick of finding everything out from the Slytherins."
"Good thinking!" said Harry, also looking up at the owls. "Hey, Hermione, I think you're in luck—"
A gray owl was soaring down toward Hermione.
"It hasn't got a newspaper, though," she said, looking disappointed. "It's -"
But the gray owl landed in front of my plate, closely followed by four barn owls, a brown owl, and a tawny.
"Did you take out a subscription, too?" Harry asked, seizing my goblet before it was knocked over by the cluster of owls, all of whom were jostling close to me and Hermione, trying to deliver their own letter first.
Shaking my head, I took the envelope from the gray owl, put on my glasses, and read it. The first thing I noticed about the letter was that it wasn't handwritten, but composed from pasted letters that seemed to have been cut out of the Daily Prophet.
YOU ARE A WICKED GIRL. HARRY POTTER DESERVES BETTER. GO ROT IN AZKABAN WITH YOUR DEATH EATER FATHER.
I scowled at the letter. "You've got to be kidding."
"What's wrong?" Harry asked.
"Just... Look at this!" I tossed the letter at Harry.
"I got one, too!" Hermione exclaimed. "How ridiculous —"
She showed me the letter which said, GO BACK WHERE YOU CAME FROM MUGGLE.
"They're all like it!" said Hermione desperately, opening one letter after another. " 'Harry Potter can do much better than the likes of you. . . .' 'You deserve to be boiled in frog spawn... "
I opened another one for me, but this one I didn't read aloud yet. I read In Witch Weekly about your mother and how you are conspiring with your murderous father and playing Harry Potter false and that boy has had enough hardship and I will be sending you a curse by next post as soon as I can find a big enough envelope.
The article hadn't said anything about me "conspiring" against Harry with Sirius.
"This is unbelievable," I ranted. "This is absolutely unbelievable. The nerve of these people to write this stuff about us! Harry, look at this. They're claiming I'm conspiring against you with Sirius when the article literally said that it hadn't been confirmed whether I've had contact with him! Not to mention half of them aren't even handwritten so the letters can't be traced back to whatever stupid idiot sent it... cowards. This is so —"
"Ouch!" Exclaimed Hermione. She had opened the last envelope, and a smelly, yellowish-green liquid gushed over her hands, which began to erupt in large yellow boils.
"Undiluted bubotuber pus!" I said furiously. "These people —"
"Ow!" said Hermione, tears gathering in her eyes as she tried to rub the pus off her hands with a napkin, but her fingers were now so thickly covered in painful sores that it looked as though she were wearing a pair of thick, knobbly gloves.
"You'd better get up to the hospital wing," I said as the owls around Hermione and I took flight. "I'll come with you, and if I see Pansy Parkinson on the way, I'll make her regret this."
"We'll tell Professor Sprout where you've gone," Harry said. "Please don't kill anybody."
"No promises," I muttered darkly, guiding Hermione away from the table and towards the entrance of the Great Hall.
Luke walked in just as we walked out. He gave Hermione a concerned once-over. "What —"
"Later," I said. "She needs the hospital wing now."
Madame Pomfrey shook her head, muttering indignantly about the ill-wishers as she bandaged Hermione's hands. "Sending them to a Hogwarts student! Filch is not doing his job... I'll be having words with him..."
I hoped she did; I was pretty sure Madame Pomfrey was the only one at Hogwarts who scared Filch more than Dumbledore.
We ended up missing all of Herbology but made the last portion of Care of Magical Creatures. As we headed out we ran into Luke and I told him about the letters and ranted about how stupid these people were. Luke shook his head in disbelief and said he couldn't believe people would do something like that to a couple of teenagers.
"Can you buy these as pets, Hagrid?" Ron was asking excitedly as what looked like a niffler dived into the soil, splattering his robes.
"Yer mum wouldn' be happy, Ron," replied Hagrid, grinning. "They wreck houses, nifflers. I reckon they've nearly got the lot, now," he added, pacing around the patch of earth while the nifflers continued to dive. "I on'y buried a hundred coins." He looked up and spotted us heading over. Oh there y'are, Hermione, Ash! Well, let's check how yeh've all done! Count yer coins! An' there's no point tryin' ter steal any, Goyle," he added, his beetle-black eyes narrowed. "It's leprechaun gold. Vanishes after a few hours."
Goyle emptied his pockets, looking extremely sulky. It turned out that Ron's niffler had been most successful, so Hagrid gave him an enormous slab of Honeydukes chocolate for a prize. The bell rang across the grounds for lunch; the rest of the class set off back to the castle, but Harry, Ron, Hermione and I stayed behind to help Hagrid put the nifflers back in their boxes. I noticed Madame Maxime watching us out of her carriage window.
"What yeh done ter your hands, Hermione?" said Hagrid, looking concerned
Hermione and I told him about the hate mail we'd received that morning, and the envelope full of bubotuber pus.
"Aaah, don worry," said Hagrid gently, looking down at her. "I got some o' those letters an all, after Rita Skeeter wrote abou me mum. 'Yeh're a monster an yeh should be put down.' 'Yer mother killed innocent people an if you had any decency you d jump in a lake.'"
"No!" Hermione and I gasped, shocked.
"Yeah," said Hagrid, heaving the niffler crates over by his cabin wall. "They're jus' nutters. Don' open 'em if yeh get any more. Chuck 'em straigh' in the fire."
"You missed a really good lesson," Harry told Hermione as they headed back toward the castle. "They're good, nifflers, aren't they, Ron?"
Ron, however, was frowning at the chocolate Hagrid had given him. He looked thoroughly put out about something.
"What's the matter?" said Harry. "Wrong flavor?"
"No," said Ron shortly. "Why didn't you tell me about the gold?"
"What gold?" said Harry.
"The gold I gave you at the Quidditch World Cup," said Ron. "The leprechaun gold I gave you for my Omnioculars. In the Top Box. Why didn't you tell me it disappeared?"
Harry frowned. "Oh... I dunno ... I never noticed it had gone. I was more worried about my wand, wasn't I?"
We climbed the steps into the entrance hall and went into the Great Hall for lunch.
"Must be nice," Ron said abruptly, when they had sat down and started serving themselves roast beef and Yorkshire puddings. "To have so much money you don't notice if a pocketful of Galleons goes missing."
"Listen, I had other stuff on my mind that night!" said Harry impatiently. "We all did, remember?"
"I didn't know leprechaun gold vanishes," Ron muttered. "I thought I was paying you back. You shouldn't've given me that Chudley Cannon hat for Christmas."
"Forget it, all right?" said Harry.
Ron speared a roast potato on the end of his fork, glaring at it. Then he said, "I hate being poor."
Harry, Hermione, and I looked at each other. It was obvious that neither of us had any idea what to say.
"It's rubbish," said Ron, still glaring down at his potato. "I don't blame Fred and George for trying to make some extra money. Wish I could. Wish I had a niffler."
"Well, we know what to get you next Christmas," said Hermione brightly. Then, when Ron continued to look gloomy, she said, "Come on, Ron, it could be worse. At least your fingers aren't full of pus." Hermione was having a lot of difficulty managing her knife and fork, her fingers were so stiff and swollen. "I hate that Skeeter woman!" she burst out savagely. "I'll get her back for this if it's the last thing I do!"
Hate mail continued to arrive for Hermione and I over the following week (though Hermione definitely had it worse), and although we followed Hagrid's advice and stopped opening it, several of our ill-wishers sent Howlers, which exploded at the Gryffindor table and shrieked insults at her for the whole Hall to hear. Even those people who didn't read Witch Weekly knew all about the supposed Harry-Krum-Hermione-Me thing now. Harry was getting sick of telling people that he wasn't involved with Hermione or me.
"It'll die down, though," he told us, "if we just ignore it. ... People got bored with that stuff she wrote about me last time..."
"I want to know how she's listening into private conversations when she's supposed to be banned from the grounds!" I said angrily. "And why Dumbledore isn't doing anything about it — we're underage, there's got to be some sort of law protecting us from this garbage!"
Hermione and I hung back in our next Defense Against the Dark Arts lesson to ask Moody if Rita been using an Invisibility Cloak.
"No, I would've seen her," Moody told us.
"What about the Marauders' Map?" I asked, crossing the room to his desk, where the map lay. "There's got to be something..." I scanned the map. Moody headed over, leaning on the desk and putting his hands palms-down.
"You done, there?" He asked.
"Yeah," I said. "She wouldn't be here now."
"And you didn't see her at the second task?" Hermione repeated.
"No," Moody replied. I continued to scan the map, tuning out of what Moody was saying. I noticed one of his hands was placed over the classroom we were in. As he continued speaking to Hermione his hand shifted, and I saw the classroom and the three little dots with our names on it. But something was off. There was my name at Moody's desk. There was Hermione's name, on the other side by the first row of desks. But where Moody was standing, there was the name Bartemius Crouch.
" — thanks anyhow, Professor Moody," Hermione's voice broke in, making me jump. Moody — or should I say Crouch looked back down at the map and seemed to realize his hand had moved.
I quickly plastered on a smile, hoping he'd think I didn't see. "Yes, thanks, Professor."
"Good luck with that Skeeter woman," he said. His eye seemed to be scanning my brain. I prayed he couldn't read minds. "She's written plenty about me, she got bored quickly enough. The same will happen in this case. Alright, then. See you two next lesson."
We headed back downstairs and caught up with Harry and Ron in the entrance hall.
"Well, Rita's definitely not using an Invisibility Cloak!" Hermione panted, pulling Harry's hand away from one of his wiggling ears (the side effect of one of Moody — no, wait, Crouch's — hexes) so that he could hear her. "Moody says he didn't see her anywhere near the judges' table at the second task, or anywhere near the lake!"
"Is there any point in telling you two to drop this?" said Ron.
"No!" said Hermione stubbornly. "I want to know how she heard me talking to Viktor! And how she found out about Hagrids mum!"
"Maybe she had you bugged," said Harry.
"Bugged?" said Ron blankly. "What... put fleas on her or something?"
Harry started explaining about hidden microphones and recording equipment. Ron was fascinated, but Hermione interrupted them.
"Aren't you two ever going to read Hogwarts, A History^"
"What's the point?" said Ron. "You know it by heart, we can just ask you."
"All those substitutes for magic Muggles use — electricity, computers, and radar, and all those things — they all go haywire around Hogwarts, there's too much magic in the air. No, Rita's using magic to eavesdrop, she must be... If I could just find out what it is... ooh, if it's illegal, I'll have her ..."
"Haven't we got enough to worry about?" Ron asked her. "Do we have to start a vendetta against Rita Skeeter as well?"
"I'm not asking you to help!" Hermione snapped. "Ash and I will do it on our own!"
"Ash, are you okay?" Harry asked over the other two arguing.
"Oh, yeah," I lied. "Yeah, just pissed off about Skeeter." But when Ron and Hermione weren't looking, I whispered, "We need to talk about Moody."
There were a lot of secrets in this school, but this was one that needed to be told.
Ew why is that last sentence like that
Also I cannot be the only one who thinks Draco could've been a Legilimens. The guy was able to throw off Snape. SNAPE.
Anyway looks like Ash has some tea :O What's gonna happen
Enjoy and comment for more!
~~~~ Kingfisher ~~~~
and Mr. Wiggle Arms
~~~~(^=^)~~~~