Another Prisoner, Another Professor

Dinner that night.

"You won't believe this," Hermione said, dropping her books on the floor and taking the empty seat next to Ron. The rest of the Great Hall had been eating for the last five minutes.

"Buckbeak clawed Malfoy's arm again and now he's going to be called Nearly Armless Malfoy," Ron replied, watching Nearly Headless Nick conversing with Percy down at the other end of the table.

"I was up in the library and I spent hours searching - I even asked Madam Pince and she gave me a really suspicious look - but all the books about blood magic are gone."

Harry looked up from his cooked carrots.

"Maybe there's a paper about it assigned in a class," said Ron, shrugging. "They'll probably all be back again in a few weeks."

"Blood magic isn't the sort of thing that gets taught at Hogwarts, it's very old and very obscure! Doesn't it strike you as odd that every single book on the topic is missing from the library?" Hermione's face looked flushed and anxious.

"Maybe a professor needed to look at them."

"Oh, Ron!" she snapped. "Do you even care about any of this?"

"Yeah!" Ron protested. "I mean, I care about Harry not getting eaten by a werewolf, obviously - "

"Glad to hear that, Ron," said Harry.

" - but this bit about blood magic sounds like rubbish to me. I mean, it'd be one thing if Lupin actually had some of Harry's blood, but what is writing in his own blood going to do? And if it was going to do anything, it should have done something by now, wouldn't you think? I reckon he's just a madman."

"As for 'wouldn't you think'," said Hermione, reaching for the pumpkin juice, "I don't know what I think about blood magic, because I can't have an informed opinion, because the books are all gone. I think after dinner we ought to all go the library and look some more."

Ron groaned; Harry sighed, imagining a long evening spent with his neck craned to one side as he read titles off the spines of row after row of books.

"Well, fine," said Hermione indignantly. "I suppose I can just stay up nights worrying that Lupin's going to - "

"We'll go after dinner," Harry interrupted hastily, thinking of Hermione staying up until the early hours of the morning. Since school had started, he had begun to worry a bit about Hermione; there were dark circles under her eyes, and every night when Harry went up to bed she was still sitting in the common room, writing frantically on long scrolls of parchment and flipping the pages of enormous, leather-bound books. Her class load seemed to be impossibly full, but she ignored any objections about the amount of work she was doing.

The library, when they arrived after dinner, seemed to be filled with first-years, most of who were staring at the rows of shelves with looks of pure terror on their faces. Hermione spoke to one; it seemed that Snape had assigned them a foot-long essay on the uses of yarrow leaves, without ever having actually discussed yarrow leaves in class. As she began to rattle off the names and locations of the different sections of the library, Harry and Ron wandered towards the back.

"You know, I think this is where they keep the antique books," said Ron, looking at the shelves just in front of the Restricted Section. There was a musty smell so thick that Harry almost choked. "Ought to be the place to find something 'very old and very obscure', eh?"

He had no sooner reached out to touch one of the books when Madam Pince appeared seemingly from nowhere, a horrified expression on her face. "Weasley! Are you thinking of touching one of those books? Are you aware of the extreme value of every single volume on this shelf? Is there anything foul on your breath that might disintegrate a page?"

Ron looked extremely offended. "Gloves!" Pince shrieked, and whipped out two pairs of light lavender gloves from a pocket somewhere in her robes; she did it so quickly that Harry was not entirely sure that she had not conjured the gloves from midair. "Wear these gloves, both of you, and try to hold your breath while you read as much as you can. Do not laugh, do not lick your lips, do not blow your nose. If I find that there has been even the most minimal damage to any of these books, I will be most assuredly speaking to your Head of House and punishing you to the full extent of my power." With that she turned sharply on her heel and stalked off after some of the first-years, who had the misfortune of having been drenched by a book about the role of water in magical history.

Ron looked at the gloves disgustedly. "I think Lockhart might have left these behind. I'm not wearing the stupid things."

Harry winced at the color, but as he decided he did not need Pince speaking to McGonagall on top of everything else, said, "They're awful, but I think we'd better do it."

Ron rolled his eyes but complied.

The sole factor connecting the books in the shelf in front of the Restricted Section seemed to be that they were very old; Harry found a book about puffskeins next to the autobiography of a third-century witch called Ann Tediluvian. From several aisles ahead he could hear Hermione still talking to the first-years, who seemed to be in awe of her.

"Here, look at this," said Ron. "Magic of Ancient Egypt. Look, they've got an illustration of a cursed mummy with three arms, I saw one of those over the summer."

Harry looked; the mummy in the drawing had an extra arm coming out of its mouth. "Awful curse," Ron said. "They all starved to death because they couldn't get any food past the third arm." He set the book back on the shelf and looked at the one next to it.

As Harry stood on the tips of his toes to look at the top shelf, a very handsome boy stepped into the aisle. He looked to be at least a fifth-year; he had wavy brown hair that grazed the collar of his robe, the sort of hair that Harry thought girls must find very attractive. He looked away and began to search the top shelf again.

"Are you trying to get something down?" the boy asked. He was at least six inches taller than Harry; Harry hurriedly tugged off his gloves and shoved them in his pocket.

"Er, just that one," he said, jerking his thumb at a red book with Hereditary Powers written on the spine in faded gold lettering. The boy reached up when -

"Diggory!" screamed Madam Pince, once again materializing with an almost frightening amount of speed. "Has this school reached the point where not even the prefects follow the rules of the library? I have already had to speak to Professor Sprout twice about Hufflepuff students - "

"I'm sorry, I've never been in this section before," Diggoy said, his eyes widening slightly. They were a very clear gray, Harry noticed.

"Gloves are required! Ask Potter if you can use his, provided that he still has them and has not - "

"I still have them," said Harry quickly, pulling them out of his pocket. Pince glared at him, her eyebrows raised, and walked away.

As Diggory reached for the gloves, Harry accidentally dropped them, biting the inside of his lip as he crouched down to pick them up. He failed to understand how Hermione could spend so many contented hours in this place.

"Sorry," he said to Diggory.

Diggory shrugged. "Can I borrow yours, then?" he asked Ron.

"You can if you want them," Ron replied, "but you might as well just take the book down, I sneezed on them."

Diggory took a quick look outside the aisle, and then reached up for the book. "Here you are," he said, handing it to Harry. Harry smiled slightly and reached out to take it.

As he grabbed the spine, one of his fingers brushed against Diggory's and with a sudden horror he realized that the nearly indescribable sensation he had felt after drinking Neville's potion was coming over him again. The musty smell of the books seemed to block out all of the clean air; the light overhead was too bright; the voices of the first-years sounded too high and before Harry could completely comprehend what was happening, he found himself covered in darkness again.

This time the darkness was not the unconscious deadening it had been before; Harry could smell a moldy sort of scent, and he could hear soft muffled noises on his right. Cautiously he took a step forward; his left hand bumped against something that felt like a glass bottle, and then he was inexplicably in the library again, next to Ron, who was leaning over to look at some books on a lower shelf. Diggory had gone.

"I think it's really awful of Snape to assign them something like that," Hermione said from behind him, coming into the aisle. "And I don't understand why - I mean, I know he can act horribly, but it can't reflect well on him if most of his class is failing, can it? It's no good spending any time back here, I've looked through it already. The only shelves I haven't thoroughly searched are the ones by the east windows."