June Week

Chapter 11: Black Watch

"It´s not my fault! He made me do it."

"I did not, you baby. It was your idea in the first place."

"Quiet, both of you!" said Minerva in exasperation. "Mr. Barnett, I highly doubt that Mr. MacGinnis forcibly dragged you to the kitchens at midnight and stuffed your mouth with ice cream and fudge sauce. And Mr. MacNair, even if it was Mr. Barnett´s idea, you didn´t have to go along with it."

They´d reached their destination - the Ravenclaw common room entrance - by then, she propelling the two miscreants in front of her all the way. Now she pointed to the door firmly. "Back inside - fifteen points off for each of you, and another ten for being repeat offenders - and I´m telling Professor Ailnoth in the morning."

The boys went sheepishly inside, one of them muttering to the other "How does she do it? It´s like she comes out of nowhere."

"And be sure you wash before you get in bed!" Minerva shouted after them. "You´re sticky!"

The door slammed on the last word. She blew out an irritated sigh and started making her way back down the staircase. This was only the fifth week of the term, and already she´d caught that pair out of bed six times. Professor Ailnoth was too soft on the Ravenclaws, she thought. If she were in charge, she´d - well, never mind.

Reaching the bottom of the stairs, she headed back toward the kitchens, intending to warn the house-elves to be on the lookout for the perpetually hungry Barnett and MacGinnis. She´d found herself doing this sort of thing more and more lately. Patrolling the halls as a cat , though it still hadn´t yielded the results she wanted, had made her every out-of-line student´s worst nightmare. It was almost ridiculously easy to catch them - she´d pad along silently in their wake, then turn human when they weren´t looking and nab them in a flash. Not that she wanted to be the Hallway Police, especially when she had her own business to take care of; she just couldn´t let misbehavior slide when she saw it. Anyway, she thought, it was for their own safety. If anyone knew what sorts of unpleasant things could happen to a student walking around alone late at night, she did.

On the note of unpleasant things, she wondered, for the thousandth time, how she was going to avoid exposing her Animagus form to Tom. Dumbledore had only been away for two days, and she´d been able to skirt the issue so far - but she had to teach the seventh-year Transfiguration class tomorrow, and there Tom would be, with no avoiding him.

Just then, Dippet´s Siamese cat, Isolde, came scampering along the corridor and stopped in front of Minerva. She yowled loudly. Minerva switched to cat form to talk to her.

There you are! Isolde was saying. I´ve been looking for you.

Why? Minerva asked without much interest. Once she´d started communicating with Isolde, she´d learned that the other cat was the feline equivalent of those matchmaking women who wanted to pair off the world. She was forever suggesting one tomcat or another as a suitable partner for Minerva, no matter how often Minerva explained that she had not the slightest romantic interest in cats. Probably Isolde had found a new specimen to parade in front of her.

You asked me a while ago to tell you if any of the humans were meeting in secret, Isolde said. Well, a pack of them are, right now. I saw them. They´re up in the tower.

Where? Which tower?

The tall one.

Minerva felt her hackles rise in frustration. Though Isolde, like all cats, could find her way nearly anywhere, she wasn´t very good at giving directions.

Isolde, there are four towers here. Six if you count the ones in the barbican. All of them are tall. I need more to go on than that.

The one with the good afternoon sunshine. In the corridor where the bits- and-pieces windows are. I don´t want to go back. The humans frightened me.

You don´t have to go back,Minerva said. I need you to take a message for me.

A message! No. I don´t carry messages. Get an owl.

You have to. There´s no time to go looking for owls. All you have to do is go home, to Dippet´s rooms, and let him read it; then you can stay there where it´s safe. Without waiting for the cat to agree or decline, Minerva switched quickly back to human form, took her pad and quill out of her pocket, scribbled a note to Dippet and stuck it to Isolde´s blue velvet collar with an adhesion charm. But she hadn´t reckoned on feline stubbornness.

I won´t! said Isolde. I won´t, I won´t! And she ran off in the opposite direction from the way Minerva wanted her to go.

"Come back here!" Minerva yelled, to no avail. All she saw was Isolde´s long tail vanishing round a distant corner.

Wretched beast! she thought fiercely, pacing from one side of the hallway to the other. What was she going to do? If she went and fetched Dippet herself, whoever was meeting secretly in the West Tower might be gone when they got there. Then she would look silly. If she went alone, though - but surely it would be all right. She´d gotten top marks in Defense Against The Dark Arts, and been a solid member of the dueling team, though not the best. She could protect herself. And anyway, it might turn out to be nothing but some students who had sneaked up there to drink and fool around. The Astronomy Tower was the usual venue of choice for that sort of thing, but perhaps they´d decided the hooting of the owls in the Owlery overhead would be romantic.

Her mind made up, she transformed again and tore off in the direction of the West Tower. Isolde had been right when she said it had good afternoon sun. Starting around two o´clock, you could find half the cats in the castle there, lying spread out in the corridor she had mentioned with the colored light from the stained- glass windows playing over their fur. Minerva had spent a few afternoons there herself during the summer. There were several rooms opening off it, but only one, a small, bare one halfway down its length, was ever unlocked.

She got to the tower in two minutes flat and slunk up the stairs to the third floor, sides heaving with the effort of her run. The beautiful windows were black in the darkness now, their pictures of knights and ladies lost until sunrise. Over the owl noises drifting down from above, she could hear voices coming from the room she had thought of, and she edged as close as she could to the door, lowering her head so her sensitive ears were as close as possible to the crack underneath it. Low though the voices were, she could pick out enough words to make her eyes go wide.

"Grindelwald needs ... on the inside ..."

"... loyal? If you´re not ..."

"Only a few of you at first. Then later ..."

"... of course ... reward ... he always ..."

"... what we need to do, and we´ll do it."

"You can ... on us."

Gods above. Albus and Bella were right, she thought. Someone really is recruiting people here to work for Grindelwald. She hadn´t been able to recognize any of the voices, but at least some of them sounded young enough to be among the older students.

Suddenly, the voices began to move closer to the door, and she flattened herself to the ground in fright for a moment. They were leaving.

I have to stop them. Looking around wildly, she saw an alcove a few feet to the right of the door. It looked as if it had been made to hold one of Hogwarts´ many suits of armor, which meant it was large enough to hold her in her human form. Just before the door opened, she scooted over to it, transformed, and pulled her wand out of her pocket, holding it vertically against her chest with both hands and mentally flipping through possible plans of action. Running for help would do no good - they would get away. Calling for help would be even worse - there were too many of them, and they would overpower her before anyone came. Finally, she settled on a strategy that was simple and drew on her advantage of surprise. First she would let them get past her. Then she would take out as many as she could from behind, by stealth. Then she would fight the ones that were left. It could work - and if she were lucky, Isolde would think better of her decision and take the message to Dippet after all.

She hadn´t figured it out a moment too soon, because now the first person hove into view, moving silently and swathed from head to foot in a hooded black cloak. It was one of the eeriest sights she´d ever seen.

This figure turned out to be leading a line of five. As they approached, she shrank back as far into the alcove as she could, willing the shadows to cover her up and wishing she´d studied invisibility magic instead of taking that useless extra year of Divination.

Just keep walking, all of you. Don´t notice me. Don´t look at me. I´m not here.

One by one, the figures passed, cloak hoods drawn so closely around their faces that they looked like monks on their way to midnight services in the chapel. The last one went by a little closer to the wall than its companions, and its fluttering sleeve brushed against her arm, soft and ticklish as a cobweb. She squeezed her eyes shut in disgust at the touch. A droplet of cold, panicky sweat slid down the side of her face. Her fingers tightened on her wand.

Not yet - wait -

They were all moving on now, ten feet away, fifteen feet, twenty, at the head of the stairs, beginning to descend. This was her chance. With Professor Wulfstan´s advice on dueling - "Disarm and disable, children, disarm and disable!" - echoing in her head, she drew a deep breath, stepped out of her hiding place and leveled her wand at the black-clad backs.

"Stupefy!" she hissed under her breath, and the two closest figures stiffened and collapsed in their tracks. "Expelliarmus! Accio wands!" A pair of wands flew up and out from the fallen bodies. She reached to catch them. That was where her plan began to unravel. Instead of dropping into her outstretched hand, the wands glanced off her fingertips, fell onto the flagstones with a clatter, and spun away across the floor.

The sound seemed to echo through the vault of the tower forever, so loudly that the remaining figures couldn´t help but hear it. One of them whirled in a billow of cloak to confront the unexpected attacker while the other two hurried on down the stairs. As stealth was futile at this point, Minerva shouted "Stupefy!" at the top of her lungs and swept her own wand in a half-circle at the entire group. She managed to tag the one facing her and make it stagger, but the others were moving too fast for her to zero in on them.

"Leave them! Come on!" shouted one of the retreating figures. To Minerva´s amazement, it was a female voice, high, clear and completely unfamiliar. The half-stunned figure wavered briefly, then abandoned its fallen companions and fled on unsteady legs.

For a minute, she thought she was going to get close enough to try another attack. Their lead was too great, however, and they reached the bottom of the staircase just as she set foot on the top step. In unison, two of them raised their wands and brought them crashing down on the handrails, shouting something incoherent. Minerva had just enough time to wonder what they were trying to accomplish before a violent shudder traveled up the rails to where she stood, and, with a crack and a rumble, the entire staircase split away from the landing, leaving her teetering on the edge above a sheer drop to the second floor below.

She grabbed instinctively for the truncated rail nearest her, losing hold of her own wand in the process, and slowly, painfully, started to haul herself back over the brink. Then the staircase gave another jerk. Her scrabbling fingers lost their purchase, and she toppled backward into empty air.

There were half a dozen things she could have done to cushion the imminent blow, but at the moment her feet left the top step, what flashed through her mind was something Dumbledore had said to her on the dock months before: Suppose you were falling and had to transform? Now we know you could.

Seizing on that, she switched into her cat form as the ceiling dropped away from her and the floor rushed closer, feeling her entire body twist automatically in midair and right itself just before she landed. All four of her feet struck the flagstones with a loud crunching sound, as if each had landed in a giant bowl of cornflakes. Searing agony shot upward from the impact points - the pain of splintering bones, of exploding joints, a pain that filled up the world and sent darkness swirling around her.

Somehow, she managed to change back into human form, with the thought that she would be able to call for help. As it turned out, however, she couldn´t suck in a large enough breath to do so. Another immense pain blossomed underneath her ribs when she tried, like a sharpened broomstick handle stabbing her in the chest. She coughed, felt some sort of hot, foamy liquid run from the corner of her mouth, and subsided onto the floor, where she lay still, listening to her own labored breathing. It had a wheezy leaking-tire whistle in it. In. Wheeze. Out. Whistle.

I´m dying. The idea wasn´t as terrifying as one might expect. At least it would mean an end to this torment. But if she died now, then there would be no one to say what had happened here. That wouldn´t do. Someone had to report to Dippet. And she wanted to see Albus one more time, even if only to tell him goodbye - a selfish desire, yes, but it gave her the incentive to hang on a little longer.

In the distance, she heard children´s voices, too young to be those of the conspirators, and thought What are students doing here? They´re supposed to be in bed, and then Oh no, they´re going to be so frightened when they see me. The voices drew nearer, rising shrilly into near-hysteria. Then hands touched her and the pain, which she had believed could grow no worse, did anyway. She drifted away to escape it.