It was only when Harry and Hermione followed the three professors out of the small ward that they discovered the hospital wing's entrance was already blocked.
Their dormmates were crowded into the doorway, along with Ron's brothers and sisters and a good number of other Gryffindors who must have run all the way from the common room.
They stood jammed shoulder to shoulder, craning their necks to peer past the rows of coughing patients, and every face wore the same look of hesitation. They clearly wanted to come in, and just as clearly dreaded being told to leave.
"Professor Dumbledore, Professor Watson, Professor McGonagall."
Neville was the first to find his voice. His round face was pale in the lamplight, and he twisted the hem of his sodden robes in both hands as he spoke.
"Ron and Lavender… are they…?"
He didn't finish.
Harry felt a gaze settle on him and looked up.
Ginny was standing a little apart from the others, her arms wrapped tightly around herself, her face white beneath her red hair. She did not say a word, but her brown eyes were fixed on him with a question in them.
Shame rose hot in Harry's throat, and he dropped his own gaze to the flagstones. He could not look at her, when it was he who had asked her brother to stand watch.
"Poppy?"
Dumbledore turned to Madam Pomfrey, who had planted herself in the doorway with her arms folded like a sentry.
"All right—"
Madam Pomfrey sighed through her nose, resigned, and her sharp eyes travelled over the three red-haired Weasleys at the front of the crowd. Her stern expression softened by a fraction.
"You three may go in and see them. Five minutes, and not a second more!"
Fred, George and Ginny slipped past her without a sound. Fred, who ordinarily could not pass a doorway without a joke, did not even lift an eyebrow.
The rest of the Gryffindors lingered, shifting from foot to foot and eyeing the closing door.
Then Professor McGonagall swept her formidable gaze across them, slowly, from one end of the crowd to the other. She said nothing at all, but within three seconds the corridor had emptied, and the students were scuttling away like frightened mice, pattering off down the staircase.
By the time the four of them came down to the Great Hall, the evening meal was long over. The house-elves had cleared the plates, and only a few students sat chatting in twos and threes along the vast tables.
Outside the high windows the rain still beat against the glass, and the enchanted ceiling hung low and black above them, without a single star.
Harry noticed several heads turn as the little group crossed the entrance hall: Dumbledore and beside him Professor Watson with his hands in his sleeves. Behind them walked Professor McGonagall stiff ly, and finally the two students, who were still damp and mud-stained.
Curious eyes followed them all the way to the far end of the hall, where they turned and vanished through the entrance to the Slytherin dungeons.
The air grew colder with every step down the stone stair. Moisture encrusted on the walls and the torches sputtered green-tinged in their brackets, and somewhere in the distance water dripped steadily, as though the whole castle were weeping.
Knock, knock, knock—
Bryan rapped lightly on the heavy door at the end of the passage. A curt "Enter" came from within, and he pushed it open and stepped inside first, as easily as if he were walking into his own office.
Harry squeezed in eagerly behind him.
Snape's office was exactly as he remembered it: low, cramped and dank, its shelves crowded with glass jars in which pale, shapeless things floated in murky preservative. Something in one of the nearest jars turned slowly as the door's draught reached it, and Harry looked hastily away.
Snape himself stood at the table in the middle of the room, a small brass scale in one hand. In the other he held a pair of tweezers, with which he was weighing out the dried, curled husks of some insect, one after another, onto the pan. Judging by the neat rows laid out on the wood, he was preparing for a lesson.
He looked up at the sound of the door. Then, as one person after another followed Bryan into his cramped office, his black eyes narrowed. A headmaster, two deputy heads and two students, arriving at once and unannounced, could mean only one thing: something had happened.
When his gaze fell on Harry, who couldn't stop looking around the room, searching the corners as though the missing thing might turn up behind a jar, the sinister gleam in those eyes sharpened.
But it did not stay on Harry for long. It slid past him and came to rest on Bryan.
"Are we disturbing you, Severus?"
Bryan's tone was brightly almost sounding cheerful. He strolled across the room and, quite naturally, perched himself on the edge of the square table, inches from the weighed rows of insects.
Hermione pressed her lips together, and a few small ticks of irritation crept across her forehead. At a time like this, was there really any need for pleasantries?
Evidently Snape agreed with her. He ignored Bryan's greeting altogether, set the scale down with a click, and turned his frosty gaze on Dumbledore instead.
"Bryan's office has been broken into, Severus."
Dumbledore spoke as though he were remarking on the weather.
"Miss Granger's and Mr. Potter's dormitories have suffered the same misfortune, and each of them has lost something. Ah, and Mr. Ron Weasley and Miss Lavender Brown were found lying unconscious in Bryan's office. They do not look to us like the sort of culprits who steal things. They look, rather, as though they were hurt in the defence of it."
Bryan nodded slightly.
"There are no signs of a struggle in the office. As I see it, by the time those two reached it, the thief had probably already gone inside, and Ron and Lavender walked straight into an ambush. Hm—"
He paused, thinking, and let his glance drift toward Harry and Hermione.
"Harry believes the whole thing was Draco's doing. He believes that even the person who tried to get into my office last time was Draco. So we thought it only fair to have Draco come down and clear his name."
The corner of Snape's mouth twisted.
Harry, watching it, knew instinctively that the Potions master badly wanted to take a jab at him, and could almost hear the sneer taking shape. But with Dumbledore and Bryan both standing there, or perhaps because there was something else he was more anxious to know, Snape swallowed it.
In the end the remark never came.
"What did you lose, Bryan?"
His jet-black eyes held Bryan's face.
"Cliodna's staff."
Bryan did not keep him in suspense.
"Harry, for his part, lost a dagger Sirius gave him, one that can break through defensive magic. And the little vial of Felix Felicis that Hermione got from Horace has gone missing too."
The logic connecting the three items was not hard to follow, and Snape understood it. A muscle moved in his thin cheek.
"A little toy dagger and a vial of Felix Felicis."
He stared at Bryan, and his expression was thoroughly sinister.
"…opened the door to your office? Is that what you are telling me?"
"That possibility cannot be ruled out."
Bryan said it with perfect, cheerful composure, as though they were discussing a puzzle in a newspaper.
Meanwhile, Dumbledore had drifted away from the conversation.
He seemed suddenly to have taken a lively interest in the little heaps of dried billywig stings set out on the table.
With a shake of his sleeve he freed his old, long-fingered hand and crumbled a pinch of the powder between thumb and forefinger. Then, with an expression of curiosity, he put it in his mouth and tasted it with evident relish.
Apart from Hermione, who stared at him in astonishment, no one noticed at all.
"And your Monitoring Omni-oculars, Bryan?"
Snape's thin lips were pressed into a hard line.
"What did it see?"
A Monitoring Omni-oculars!
Harry and Hermione snapped back to attention as if jerked on a string, and turned excited eyes on Professor Watson. Going by what Snape implied, Professor Watson had set one up inside his office, and surely the creature had seen everything!
"Unfortunately—"
Bryan spread his hands, palms up, with a regretful air.
"Hogwarts' magical field is too strong. Here, every so often, the Monitoring Omni-oculars's internal circuitry takes damage and needs maintenance. I was away for a while recently, and I'm afraid I forgot all about it."
Damn!
Harry fumed silently. He had come so close to catching Malfoy red-handed!
Snape appeared equally exasperated by Professor Watson's carelessness.
He glared coldly at Bryan, then turned the same glare on Dumbledore, who had by now retreated to the edge of the room and was examining a jar of pickled something with great interest, as though none of this were any concern of his, as though he had come only to witness the outcome.
"I shall go and find Draco."
Snape dropped the sentence, swept up his black robes, and strode out of the office.
The door banged shut behind him, and the flames in the grate shivered.
"Everyone sit. There's no need to stand around like this."
Bryan, who evidently knew his way around the place, walked behind the only desk in the room and sat down as though it were his own. He spoke gently to Harry and Hermione, and his expression was kind.
At the same time, and as if on signal, Professor Dumbledore drew his wand and conjured several chairs out of the empty air. They were high-backed and comfortable-looking, and they settled onto the cold slabs with a soft creak.
Harry sank into one, but the cushion did nothing to ease the tightness in his chest.
After several minutes of silence had settled over the gloomy office, Hermione, watching Professor Watson leaf through the young wizards' after-class essays, pushed down the strange sense of incongruity in her heart and asked uneasily:
"Professor Watson… that staff. Cliodna's staff. If, if it really is lost, what effect would that have, Professor?"
The image in Harry's mind—of someone lying pale-faced in a hospital bed—dissolved at once, and he stared thunderstruck at the man behind the desk.
"Hm… it would indeed have some effect."
Professor Watson twiddled his thumbs. He leaned back in his chair until the wood groaned, and tipped his head up toward the dim stone slabs of the ceiling, so that neither Harry nor Hermione could see his face.
"You both saw the fight between Cliodna and me. Most of the power in the spells she cast came from that staff.
If the staff were to fall into her hands again… without a doubt, Voldemort would gain a powerful reinforcement."
Harry's fists clenched tightly and a sharp light flashed in his green eyes.
Of course. It all fits!
That was why Voldemort would turn Malfoy into a Death Eater…. He didn't need an underage little wizard for a minion. What he wanted was to restore the strength of his most capable subordinate!
Admittedly, even Cliodna with that staff in her hand was no match for Professor Watson. But to the other wizards who stood against Voldemort, the strength she had shown had been overwhelming.
Harry remembered the jungle of vines that had burst out of the ground at her command, and the oak giant that had risen, roaring, from the earth.
They had to stop her from getting it back!
There's still time.
Harry seized on the thought. Even if Malfoy had got his hands on the staff, he couldn't have had time to smuggle it out of Hogwarts. It had to be somewhere in the castle, or on the grounds, right now!
"No suspicious person entered the Gryffindor common room today."
Professor McGonagall came bustling into the office, out of breath. Her words only left Harry and Hermione startled and doubtful. They seemed to puzzle her as well, and a faint crease of bewilderment was on her face.
"The Fat Lady told me she remembers Mr. Weasley and Miss Brown leaving the common room early in the morning, coming back to it once later in the morning, and then leaving again very soon after. After that, they never came back."
————————————
For More Chapters; [email protected]/FicFrenzy