Crepúsculo

Crepúsculo 5

Before the Storm

***************

It was Tuesday morning, and the sixth year Gryffindors had already survived half of Double Potions with the Slytherins. Accomplishment though that was, Ginny was not particuarly optimistic about her chances of escaping the Potions dungeon alive, not only because Snape hated Gryffindors in general and Weasleys in particular, but also because Ginny and Cora's potion, which was supposed to be a benign shade of beige, had turned to luminescent lime.

"Do you think we should ask somebody for help?" Ginny said.

Cora shrugged. "Nah. We can fix it."

"Because we're Potions geniuses." Ginny rolled her eyes.

"Exactly." Cora studied her notes from the beginning of class. "Does this say bat's brains or beetle's back?"

"...And don't forget that the slightest error while brewing this potion can result in dire consequences, the least of which will involve immediate explosion," Snape informed the class.

"I'm not sure," Ginny said. "Beetle's back?"

"Okay," Cora said, adding a pinch without bothering to check her notes for the correct quantity. Ginny braced herself for an explosion; thankfully, none came. "Did I tell you what Dan and I did last night?"

Dan Rushing had become Cora's boyfriend as of Saturday night, in circumstances that were no less mysterious to Dan than they were to Ginny. Ginny had attempted to question Cora on the matter, but Cora would reveal nothing except that she had utilized her "feminine wiles" and that said feminine wiles had necessitated the use of a jar of bread-and-butter pickles.

Some parts of life, Ginny reflected, you just weren't meant to understand.

"...So anyway, when we got to the storage closet, we found a billy goat instead of a couch!" Cora had reached the punch line; unfortunately, Ginny had missed the joke. She'd been too busy concentrating on what Cora was doing to their potion: tossing in random ingredients in unmeasured quantities, with a total disregard for their directions or Potions theory or common sense--and the potion had finally taken notice, turning from bright green to yellow to a dangerous shade of red...

"Uh, Cora?" Ginny said. The potion was bubbling ominously--and were those flames on the surface? "DUCK!"

The concoction exploded.

**************

Ginny awoke under the incredibly uncomfortable scrutiny of Professor Snape's beetle-black eyes. "Ah, Miss Weasley"--few people on this earth could rival Draco Malfoy in terms of the degree of snobby disdain they could instill into Ginny's last name, but Snape was certainly one of them; 'slimy fungal growth' would have sounded positively pleasant by comparison--"awake, and, indeed, alive, are we?"

Ginny glared at him.

"That last is most unfortunate. If only you'd added mormod root instead of magmar extract, you would have created a highly toxic--" His pause, Ginny quickly realized, was not the result of any qualms on Snape's part, but rather due to Professor McGonagall's buffering presence at his side. "But, as there's nothing to be done about the unpleasant fact of your existence at the moment," Snape continued, "Professor McGonagall has kindly agreed to meet with me so that your expulsion can be made final."

McGonagall issued a cautionary, "Severus..." while Ginny sat up and burst out, "But we weren't making Restricted Potions, Professor, and it wasn't even a serious accident--"

"Firstly, correction, you weren't supposed to be making Restricted Potions. What you actually created was, however, a Type B Hallucinogen, clearly illegal under the Restriction Reform Codes of 1672. And in answer to your other claim, your highly Restricted mistake did, indeed, cause a serious accident, which you, of course, would have no way of knowing, as you were knocked out in the initial explosion by a flying piece of your own cauldron."

Ginny blanched. "Is Cora okay?"

"Miss Delera is currently in the Gryffindor Common Room," McGonagall said, to which Snape added with a sneer, "Awaiting word of the unfortunate misfit she befriended."

Cora, you little rascal, Ginny grinned to herself. One of these years Ginny would figure out how Cora managed to evade punishment so effectively. Not once in their time at Hogwarts had Cora gotten caught for something she and Ginny had done.

"But currently," Snape continued, "I would suggest that you divert your attention away from Miss Delera and consider, rather, what the nature of your punishment shall be." When connected to a Weasley, "punishment" apparently became a synonym for all things joyous in the world.

"The nature of my punishment...not the question of it?" Ginny looked between the two professors and found no allies.

"Having seen the effects of your potion and having heard Professor Snape's account of the events"--which was, of course, perfectly impartial--"I'm afraid that there is no doubt with regards to the fact of your impending punishment."

She meant impending doom.

"So you agree with me, Minerva, that expulsion is the only logical course of action?" Snape looked more than a little maniacal, as though Christmas had arrived early.

McGonagall stared at him, and said, "Miss Weasley, please return to your dormitory. I will send word when Professor Snape and I have agreed as to the course of your punishment."

Snape scowled. Ginny left. As she exited the classroom, she heard McGonagall clearly refuse to expel Ginny, thank goodness. She refrained from jumping up and down and shouting for joy, but she did permit herself to glance back at Snape's expression, and was it ever priceless. Snape's Christmas had, apparently, been cancelled.

**************

McGonagall's intervention might have set back Snape in his quest to rid Hogwarts of Weasleys forever, but it did not prevent him from seeking the most severe punishment Dumbledore would allow. "You would think that such a heinous crime would merit more than one measly month of torture--I mean, detention," Snape grumbled one week into Ginny's sentence as an inmate in the Snape's Office Jail. "Under the old rules, it would have been permissible to remove as many of your appendages as you destroyed cauldrons. Or I could have at least locked you in the prison dungeons until you rotted! In chains!"

Snape sounded alarmingly similar to Filch, but Ginny refrained from commenting. As far as she was concerned, being locked in the dungeons and left to rot would have been a fate far preferable to spending thirty evenings in the company of Professor Snape. Over the first week alone, she had already squashed squirrel spleens, boiled beaver brains, minced mice, disemboweled dingbats, and scrubbed every cauldron in the school's possession since the Dark Ages. Her lone consolation about this last was that at least he had not required that she lick the cauldrons clean.

*****************

Saturday morning dawned clear, cool, and beautiful: perfect Hogsmeade weather. Though Cora's return to the dormitory at four a.m. would have suggested that she might sleep to a decently human hour, by eight o'clock Cora had already bounced out of bed, showered, and coerced Ginny into clothing, managing to be twice as perky as Ginny while running on less than half the sleep.

"You have to look amazing today, Ginny," Cora told her. "It's your official first date with Jeremy Hayden!"

Which was a strange way of looking at this Hogsmeade visit, but true, oddly enough. Of course, there weren't but so many things you could do for a date at Hogwarts. "Great, Cora, now you've gone and gotten me nervous," Ginny said.

"Oh, don't worry. You'll be fine...as long as everything's perfect!" Ginny had never known Cora could cackle so wickedly.

"Cora Delera, evil demon matchmaker," Ginny said.

Cora grinned. "You know you love me."

When they arrived at breakfast, Ginny was relieved to discover that Cora had sprung the First Date line on Jeremy as well. He looked about as pale as...as an albino Malfoy, because you just couldn't get any paler than that.

Neither Ginny nor Jeremy could stomach much breakfast, though Cora gladly relieved them of their leftovers.

"The whole 'first date' comment was your way of making sure you got extra bacon this morning, wasn't it?" Ginny said suspiciously.

"Ginny! I can't believe you would accuse me of such an underhanded trick!" Cora exclaimed, though her unrepentant grin was more than enough proof for Ginny that her theory had been correct, and she set about attacking Cora with the serving tongs.

Luckily, Jeremy managed to pry them apart before their scuttle degenerated into an all-out food fight, which no Gryffindor, regardless of any maturity he or she might ordinarily possess, could have passed up. After Jeremy escorted them out of the Great Hall, one of them on each arm, claiming all the way that they would thank him later for saving their sorry hides from the wrath of McGonagall, Cora and Ginny engaged in a round of sticking their tongues out at each other until they burst out in hysterical laughter. Jeremy's attempt at a straight face lasted all of five seconds before he laughed with them. "You two are really too much."

They arrived in Hogsmeade and visited the usual haunts, stocking up on a liberal supply of dungbombs because, as Jeremy said, "somebody has to carry on the Weasley twins' legacy." They were sipping butterbeer in the Three Broomsticks, waiting for Dan Rushing to join them--he had been given morning detention for disrupting Hagrid's class for the third time in as many days--when Ginny had the sensation of being watched. The butterbeer in her hand froze halfway to her lips, but she forced herself to drink it; she couldn't let her watcher know she was aware of him if she wanted to catch him at it.

At first she suspected, stupidly, that people were looking at her because they were commenting on how cute she and Jeremy looked together. A quick glance around the Three Broomsticks proved that this was hardly the case: no one was paying them any more attention than anyone else in the room.

Then she thought it might be Jeremy, remembering the irrational impulses that had raced through her under his gaze during dinner a few weeks ago. But surely that had been temporary madness, and she felt none of that desperate urgency now. Today he was merely smiling and looking cute and perfect, exactly as a boy was supposed to look on his first date with a girl he really liked.

Ginny waited for the sensation of being watched again, but, in the fifteen minutes it took for Dan Rushing to arrive at the Three Broomsticks, she did not feel it once. She was eventually forced to admit to herself that she had imagined the whole thing.

*****************

The four of them had been wandering around Hogsmeade for a mere five minutes when Cora whined, "I'm bored."

Dan Rushing looked slightly pained, as if he were already failing in his newly acquired job as Cora's boyfriend--never mind that he had neither sought nor played any cognizant role in acquiring said position. Poor kid. If he'd asked Ginny, she could have told him that Cora did this every time they went to Hogsmeade, and that it had no connection to any actual boredom, but was rather the signal for Jeremy to say, "I've got an idea," and grin and continue, "It's been a while since we went to the Shrieking Shack..."

Which Jeremy did, right on cue.

Cora bounced up and down, any semblance of boredom, feigned or no, having dissipated, and grabbed the hand of one very confused Dan Rushing, and squealed, "Yeah! Let's go!"

Dan Rushing had a lot to learn about being Cora's boyfriend.

Jeremy turned to Ginny and said, "If you're up to it, that is."

Ginny matched him grin for grin. "Me back down on a challenge? Not on your life."

When they arrived at the Shrieking Shack, Ginny grabbed Jeremy's arm and whined in her best spoiled brat voice, "Daddy, Daddy, I wanna go in the haunted house! Can I? Can I?"

Jeremy patted her on the head and said, "Okay, sweetie," then burst out laughing. "You are so weird."

"But you love me anyway?" Ginny smiled.

"Yeah," and the look on his face was suddenly so serious that she wished she'd chosen a different phrasing when she'd fished for a compliment.

Luckily, Cora chose that exact moment to detach herself from Dan and bound over to them. "So," Cora said, wagging an eyebrow, "who'll be the first victim?"

Between Ginny's relief and Jeremy's surprise, it took them both a moment to realize she was referring to the Shrieking Shack.

"Dan," Ginny said, just as Jeremy said, "You," to Cora.

Cora shook her finger at them. "Dan's never been in the Shrieking Shack before--"

"Never been in the Shrieking Shack?" Jeremy said. "He's definitely got to go first."

"--But what I was saying, when you so rudely interrupted me," Cora, ever the paragon of polite behavior, continued, sticking her tongue out at Jeremy, "is that Dan wants to make sure you come out alive after going in there."

Jeremy began to make ghostly moaning noises, and Ginny put in, "Because it really is haunted, you know. By...demons! And--and swamp creatures!"

"Swamp creatures," Dan repeated. "From the local swamp."

"Right," Jeremy grinned. Everyone burst out laughing.

"Okay, so there aren't any swamp creatures," Jeremy admitted. "So, Dan, you ready?"

"I think I'll wait," Dan said.

"You, then, Cora," Ginny said.

"I'd better stay here with Dan. You know, in case any swamp creatures come after him." What she really meant was, so that she could snog the living daylights out of him, but Ginny felt no urgent need to enlighten the general public of this discrepancy.

Jeremy let out a long-suffering sigh. "All right, Ginny, it's down to you and me." It always came down to Jeremy and Ginny, and they always arm-wrestled for the privilege of entering the Shrieking Shack first. This time, like so many others, Ginny won. She suspected Jeremy of letting her win--not that he ever gave up, but he didn't utilize all of his strength--and he knew that she liked to go in the Shrieking Shack first...

With the other three egging her on, Ginny feigned reluctance as she approached the Shrieking Shack. She wasn't actually reluctant at all, but this, too, was part of the ritual, a piece of the play they put on for their own entertainment. Once inside, she would make certain to fake a few banshee screams and stop around like a troll.

She opened the door, glanced back at the others, waved--

--and was pulled forcibly over the threshold, the door slamming shut behind her.

*****************

Ginny did not scream. She could not find her voice at all.

She'd been inside the Shrieking Shack for a few minutes, and her heart rate had finally begun to slow, but she was still breathing like a racehorse and she couldn't calm down. She had already searched the downstairs twice, and she hadn't discovered a trace of the person whose hand had forced her into the house. All the money in the world couldn't have forced her upstairs; doing so would leave her with a woefully reduced number of escape routes, were her attacker to reappear.

Though she had found no physical evidence of her assailant, the sensation of eyes on her and the urgency from the Three Broomsticks gripped her suddenly. She needed to escape.

When she discovered that the front door was locked, however, she worried that her escape routes had been significantly reduced downstairs as well.

Oh, shit.

She whipped out her wand to whisper a quick, "Alohomara," but before the word even left her lips, her wand vacated her fingers to the sound of "Accio wand."

"I really wouldn't try that if I were you," came an amused voice from across the room. "The Shrieking Shack so dislikes having magic performed upon it."

"I couldn't try it if I wanted to," Ginny replied, "seeing as you've taken my wand."

The voice chuckled, and she thought she knew that laugh from somewhere but couldn't quite place it. "Ah, Weasley, you were always so clever. Always the brightest one in your family."

"Is that supposed to be an insult?"

"Think of it what you will."

"I think it sounded like an insult. I also think I'd rather be insulted to my face than from behind an invisibility cloak."

The voice chuckled again. "Anything for you, Weasley."

Draco Malfoy stepped out from behind a chair to Ginny's left that she knew she'd checked behind several times.

"But you know, Weasley," he drawled, "there's really very little point in insulting people."

Ginny stared. "That's a very un-Malfoy-like sentiment."

"Oh, no, not at all. It's always been Malfoy family policy to avoid insulting people. Why insult people when a good, accurate death threat takes care of the problem so much more quickly? Cleaner, too."

"And I suppose your family consistently follow up on these death threats?"

Malfoy shrugged elegantly. "Only on a priority basis. Though on certain days my father does take care of a larger portion of the list than usual."

"On his more evil days?"

"Don't expect me to deny my father's reputation and tell you he's really a kindhearted individual with a certain penchant for small cuddly animals."

"Wasn't gonna."

"Although he does enjoy torturing Hufflepuffs, if that counts."

"Charming as this conversation is, Malfoy, I'd really like to get back to Hogsmeade now," Ginny interrupted.

"You are in Hogsmeade."

"Not in the part of it I'd like to be in, at any rate. Would you mind terribly if I left?" Her hand was on the doorknob.

"You're not going anywhere, Weasley," Malfoy grinned. "Especially not if you keep your hand on that doorknob."

"What do you--" She looked down at her hand and shrieked: it had turned the same shade of metal at the doorknob, and her fingers felt heavy and wouldn't move--

"Let her go," Malfoy said lazily, and the house groaned. Ginny's hand fell from the doorknob and began to return to its normal shade.

"What is this place?" Ginny couldn't help but wonder aloud. She hated the fear in her voice.

"Different from anything you've ever imagined it, I'm sure," he said. She had to marvel at the political genius of his response: he'd answered exactly what she'd asked without revealing a single piece of information she couldn't have determined for herself.

"Believe me when I say I'm intrigued by the place," Ginny said, "but I'd really rather go. My wand, please." She held out her hand and mentally crossed her fingers, hoping he'd had enough fun for one morning.

Malfoy only laughed. "Oh, Weasley, you're too much. You're so eager to leave. You remind me of a little dog I used to have."

"I'm not your little dog, Malfoy," Ginny said angrily.

"You may not be my dog, but you are mine."

Ginny shivered involuntarily. "I'm not your anything."

The knowing smile on his face had not faded. She'd seen that smile before. "Not yet," he told her. "But you will be."

And suddenly he had vanished, Ginny's wand and all.

Someone was knocking on the door.

"Don't come in, it's a--" The word "trap" fell from her mouth as the door sung open and Cora entered the room, evidently perfectly fine. Ginny stared at Cora's hand: not metal, not wood, ordinary flesh and bone.

"Are you okay, Ginny?" Cora asked her. "It'd been a while since you went in, and we heard you scream, and we weren't sure if you were trying to scare Dan or what, but if you were trying to scare him, it worked--and are you okay, because you look kind-of pale."

"I'm fine," Ginny said. "No, I'm not. I think I might throw up."

Cora grabbed her arm and said, "Come on, let's get you outside."

As they left the Shrieking Shack, Ginny could have sworn she heard a low, rumbling chuckle echo through the house.

**************

After the immediate danger of Ginny emptying her stomach all over Hogsmeade's immaculate cobblestone streets had passed, Cora insisted upon escorting her back to Hogwarts. The two boys felt obliged to accompany their dates, "so nobody gets eaten by a demonic swamp creature," Jeremy joked, and everyone laughed, though Ginny consisted this a significantly more likely possibility after the events of the morning.

Jeremy and the others wanted to know just what the events of the morning had been; Ginny told them, to the extent that beginning the narrative with "I went into the Shrieking Shack" and ending with "I got nauseous" while conveniently omitting the intermediate occurrences could be considered telling. She did not account for the cause of her scream, but, thankfully, they didn't mention it.

They escorted her all the way up to her dormitory, where, after Ginny's adamant assurances that she'd be fine, Cora and Dan deserted her. Jeremy, however, lingered.

"I haven't seen you all week," he said nonchalantly, though the fact that he was bringing it up at all suggested slightly less than ambivalent feelings on the matter.

"I know. I'm sorry. I had detention..."

"Yeah, I know."

"I'm sorry today had to end like this," Ginny said.

"It's not your fault," Jeremy said.

"But of all the times to get sick..."

"Yeah, but don't worry about it." Jeremy perked up. "Hey, but you know what this means? You'll probably feel so guilty about ruining our date that you'll be forced to make it up to me, and treat me to a date twice as good as this one."

"You scheming little weasel," Ginny said. "If I didn't know better I'd say you'd gotten me sick on purpose."

Jeremy grinned at her. He was still grinning when she fell asleep.

***************

All of the tiredness that had seized Ginny around noon on Saturday had deserted her by three a.m. the next morning. She was lying awake in bed, counting sheep, goats, chickens, ducks, and every other variety of barnyard animal she could come up with. By 5,742 mice, however, she had realized the futility of this exercise, and had gotten out of bed with the vague idea of going to the bathroom, or getting some ice water, or just wandering around until she ran into something and was knocked unconscious. It was with these particularly lucid thoughts in mind that Ginny headed down the Gryffindor dormitory's second-story third year corridor, which, truth be told, contained no bathroom, no ice water, and no obstacles over which Ginny could trip and knock herself out. She did not become aware of this until she reached the end of the corridor and was faced with a threefold choice: enter the third year girls' dormitory to her left, unleash the horror of Steve the Manic-Depressive Boggart from the broom closet to her right, or look through the window that opened onto the Quidditch pitch. As she had never held a particular fondness for third year girls or for depressed semi-Dark creatures, the window won out as the best option--Option Number Four, turning around and heading back to bed, never even crossed her mind.

She could have just peered through the window and gotten back to the important business of sleeping, but early-morning madness gripped her and convinced her that gazing through glass would hardly suffice, and necessitated that she actually open the window and stick her head out like a dog in a car.

Unfortunately for her, not until her head was most of the way out of the window did she remember that she was in Scotland, and it was October, and it was bloody cold outside. With a mangled "Yeow!" Ginny jerked her head back into to the castle and slammed the window shut. She paid little attention to the solitary figure on a broomstick who had watched her misfortune with interest, laughing softly as he completed an elegant, swooping dive. By the time she returned to bed, Ginny had forgotten she had seen him at all.