After the Halloween feat that night, everyone is so full that no one moves at first. Until someone comes running into the great hall screaming about a blood message. That tends to get everyone in the moving mood.
Emma, Walter, and I follow the huge crowd of students out of the dining hall and up the stairs to the second floor, "At least it's not in the dungeons this time." I say to my friends as I push through the crowd trying to get a look at whatever it is that's going on. Emma is holding onto the belt of my pants, Walter is holding onto Emma's shirt, together we squish past all the muttering students and make our way to the front of the crowd. We gasp when we see what's actually going on. In blood, the message,
THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS HAS BEEN OPENED. ENEMIES OF THE HEIR BEWARE.
On a torch bracket stuck on the wall beside it, Filch's cat Mrs Norris is hanging, dead. Emma buries her face into Walters shirt.
"Enemies of the Heir beware?" Draco shouts from the other side of the crowd. He glances at me for a moment before continuing, "You'll be next mud bloods!"
"I'm going to kill that damn kid," I mumble, but I can't be mad right now, fear builds up inside me, I can take my eyes off of the poor cat hanging on the wall.
Footsteps approach quickly, "What's going on here? What's going on!" Its Filch, his rusty sounding voice cuts through the silence of the group. The group parts slightly to let him through. As soon as he sees his cat he clutches his face in horror. "My cat! My cat! What happened to Mrs Norris!" He screams. No one says anything, they just watch as he turns his attention to none other than Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, and Hermione Granger, who are standing in the middle of the semi-circle we have created.
"That poor man," Emma whispers.
Filch goes over to the three Gryffindors, red in the face. "You! You murdered my cat! You've killed her! I'll kill you!" Filch roars, which doesn't sit well with any of the students.
"Argus!" It was Professor Dumbledore, he and a few other teachers make their way into the centre of the group. He then goes over and takes Mrs Norris off of the torch bracket. "Argus come with me, you too Mr Potter, Mr Weasley, and Miss Granger. The rest of you go back to your common rooms immediately!" Dumbledore gives everyone instructions. The crowd, still silent, departs in every which way, Lockhart offers Dumbledore his office as we all depart.
Once we are back in our common room is when everyone starts talking at once. "The chamber of secrets? What do you suppose that is?" I hear a sixth-year girl ask her friends.
"Come into my dorm and I'll teach you if you like." An older boy says to her. The girl and her friends start screaming at him for his comment, Emma, Walter, and I narrowly miss being hit in the head with her book bag as we pass by them.
We find a corner of the room that is sort of secluded and we all plop down on the floor. "I can't believe a staff member threatened to kill a student! In front of everybody!" Emma wails.
"He's not going to do it calm down. Besides, a squib couldn't hurt a wizard!" I say back to Emma in attempts to calm her down.
"What do you mean a squib? Who's a squib?" Walter asks, nearly forgetting what it is that we saw painted on the wall.
"Filch is, the twins and I saw a letter about it in his office. But that's not the point. The point is that someone killed Mrs Norris and wrote a message about the chamber of secrets on the wall in her blood!" I look at Emma and Walter desperately. "Now we all know the rumours that Salazar Slytherin put a hidden room in Hogwarts but I didn't know it was real! I thought it was just something that us Slytherins say to freak out the other houses."
"I'll write to my grandmother. She used to tell me stories about Hogwarts, one of them included the chamber of secrets." Emma says, finally getting her act together.
"I'll ask my uncle if it has to do with Slytherins history, Uncle Lucius is the person to ask." No one was in the Halloween mood after that. No one left the common room either, which sucks because I'd rather be with George than learning the properties of the flutterby bush for my herbology class Monday morning.
"Violet, are you writing to father about what happened?" Draco knocks on the door to my dorm room and I usher him inside.
I close my textbook to give Draco my undivided attention. "I already finished my letter, Hopefully, Nutmeg will be back tomorrow morning with Aunt Narcissa response about something I asked her so we can send off our letters." Draco stands awkwardly at the edge of my bed so I move over and pat the mattress. He comes over and sits down cross-legged facing me.
"We aren't in danger or anything are we? I mean you don't necessarily act the way Slytherins are supposed to act... you might be seen as an enemy of the heir." Draco says softly.
I put my hand on his knee to comfort him. "Don't you worry about me okay? I'll manage by myself. You focus on getting your grades up and winning your first ever quidditch match."
By next week the whole school was talking about the chamber of secrets, so much so that our professors have banned talking about it in their classrooms. During my ancient ruins class Cedric Diggory, a rather attractive Hufflepuff boy asked Professor Babbling about it, which nearly got him detention.
"Hey, Violet right?" Cedric jogs up to me in the hallway Friday night after dinner. "You're a Slytherin..."
I spin around on my heels, "thank you ever so much for reminding me of my house, I was starting to get confused."
Cedric puts his hands up in the air as if to say he's not trying to attack me. "I was just curious if you knew anything about the chamber of secrets. Your house seems to always know everything."
"You've bee in my classes for the past four years, never once talking to me let alone look in my direction, and now you want me to tell you everything I know about something that doesn't concern you?" I tilt my head to the right waiting for his response.
"Well, I just thought you'd be the person to talk to given you seem to have... friends in other houses. Unlike most other Slytherin folk I know. Sorry I bothered you." Cedric leaves as George comes up beside me.
"What did Diggory want?" George asks slinking his arm around my shoulders.
"Wanted to know if I knew anything about the chamber of secrets. Thought I'd be the person to ask." I grumble as I watch Cedric walk away from us.
"Well, you don't right? So there's nothing to worry about." George turns me around gently and we start to walk towards the library so I can help him catch up on some of his school work.
The truth is I know more about it then I have let anyone but Emma and Walter know. Emma's grandmother wrote back to her almost immediately and explained the whole thing to her in great detail. She said a boy in her year, a Slytherin boy, opened the chamber and muggle-born students started to turn up dead. At that time there were far fewer of them around, especially in the Slytherin house so everyone was very concerned that the Slytherins had something to do with it. Which we did of course but that's not the point. She said that it wasn't the wizard who opened it that did all the killings, but there was a beast living in the school walls that would go around and do the killing for him. We all promised never to tell anyone that we knew so much, in fear that they would think that one of us was the heir of Slytherin. Not like people don't have their suspicions. There are whispers throughout the school that say that either Draco or I are the heir simply because our family is one of the oldest wizarding families, and we are all sorted into Slytherin besides a select few.
When George and I walk into the library, about five students turn around to look at me. Ignoring them all I take George's hand and lead him to an empty desk in one of the rows of books. "What do you want to start with?" I ask, pulling all of my textbooks out of my shoulder bag and putting them onto the desk.
"This." George cups my cheek with his hand and kisses my lips. He moves his other hand to my other cheek and holds me like that for a moment.
"Five points from both Gryffindor and Slytherin. This is a library, not a hotel room." Madam Pince says from behind us. George immediately pulls away from me and turns to face the school's librarian.
"Sorry ma'am, we'll be more discreet next time." George winks at Madam Pince and I laugh a bit.
"Another five points from Gryffindor. Keep it up Mister Weasley, it's very rare that I get to take points away from students." And with that she continues to walk down the aisle, monitoring the other students.
"Ten points for a kiss from you? One of the best exchanges I've ever made." George takes my hand in his and brings my hand to his mouth and kisses it gently. "Can you help me with the history composition, I haven't exactly started it yet and it's supposed to be four feet long."
"I know how long it's supposed to be, I finished it days ago like you were supposed to." I pull my bag into my lap and pull out a cylinder container. I pop the top off and pull out my perfectly worded composition about the events leading up to the goblin rebellion.
"Can I read it? I'll only steal a few sentences." George begs me.
"Absolutely not! All the information you need for it is in the eighth chapter of our textbook, do you ever pay attention in class?"
George snatches my history book out of the pile in front of me and flips through to find the eighth chapter. "As long as one of us pays attention than its alright. Besides I can't stand Binns voice."
"Be quiet and read. I have to rewrite my composition for herbology, it looks horrific right now."
George stops and looks at me with a smirk on his face, "Do you seriously rewrite your compositions because you don't like how they look?"
I take out my canister full of blank parchment and carefully measure out the two feet I need for my herbology composition. I shove the canister back into my bag and take out a different canister that holds the first copy of the homework. "You don't? I'd rather lie down and die than to submit a composition full of crossed-out words and accidental ink drops." I unroll the composition I've written to show George how unprofessional it looks, and put books on both the top and bottom of it to stop it from rolling back up again. "Don't distract me, I want to get this done tonight so I can actually enjoy my weekend."
"Whatever gets you out to the quidditch pitch tomorrow love."