Chapter 252: Midnight Spring Outing
After returning from the bustling streets of Hogsmeade, Tamara slipped straight toward Professor Flitwick's office. Thanks to the Virtue System's utterly cursed mechanics, she was currently barred from using highly convenient, albeit slightly dark, tracking magic. The great Dark Lord was forced to condescend to the most primitive, insulting method available. She had to forcibly dismantle the lingering Jinx attached to the confiscated broomstick to reverse-engineer the magical signature left by the caster. Taking full advantage of Flitwick's momentary inattention, her slender fingers brushed against the tail twigs of the Firebolt, successfully extracting a faint, nearly imperceptible trace of magical residue.
That was enough.
For a Dark Lord possessing magical talent leagues beyond ordinary wizards, a single thread was all it took to drag a rat out from the darkest shadows. It was entirely unrealistic to pin her hopes on those two Gryffindor idiots anyway. More, this particular rat lurking within the stone walls of Hogwarts was a traitor. It was a hidden, festering danger that could strike her back at any given moment. For Tamara, a being who demanded absolute control over her surroundings, allowing such an unpredictable threat to breathe under her nose for even a second longer was an unbearable, humiliating disgrace. She had to catch the vermin tonight and root it out completely.
The night had deepened considerably. The winding corridors of Hogwarts were steeped in the damp, biting cold characteristic of early spring. Standing just outside the entrance to the Slytherin common room, Tamara gave her wand a precise, elegant flick. That faint wisp of magical residue instantly morphed into a thin tracking line. It emitted a ghostly, pulsating red glow, winding its way steadily toward the higher reaches of the castle.
"Go. Find some amusement with that annoying Squib, and ensure neither he nor his wretched cat leaves his office tonight." Tamara tilted her head, her voice dropping into a cold, imperious whisper as she addressed the Bloody Baron floating silently in the chill air.
She watched the silver-blooded ghost bow stiffly and drift through the wall to fulfill her command. Satisfied, Tamara pulled her dark hood over her silver hair and followed the glowing red thread, her footsteps making no sound as she merged smoothly into the midnight shadows.
The trajectory of the crimson line flickered and pulsed as it ascended the grand staircases, finally coming to a dead halt just outside the heavy oak doors of the Hospital Wing. Tamara narrowed her eyes, a cruel smirk tugging at the corner of her lips. It seemed her other self—the pathetic fragment currently possessing Peter Pettigrew—intended to use the cover of night to assassinate Harry Potter while he lay defenseless in a hospital bed.
Realizing this, Tamara did not rush in to play the hero. Instead, her brilliant, twisted mind quickly calculated the most profitable angle. If the Boy Who Lived was tortured until he was hovering at death's door, perhaps even losing a useless limb in the process, and she then burst into the room as the glorious savior to turn the tide... that damn Virtue System would undoubtedly be forced to hand out a massive, attribute-boosting reward.
Her decision made, Tamara crossed her arms, her mood brightening considerably. She leaned back against the cold stone wall, hiding in the shadows just outside the door, patiently waiting for Potter's agonizing, terrified screams to shatter the silence.
Yet, time ticked by, minute by agonizing minute.
The Hospital Wing remained eerily quiet. There was not the slightest crackle of spell-casting, no thud of a desperate struggle, and absolutely none of Potter's signature, dramatic shouting. Could it be that the assassination methods of that absolute failure residing in the Diadem had actually evolved to a sophisticated, silent level?
A prickle of suspicion warned her that her perfect plan had been derailed. Gripping her wand tightly, she pressed her palm against the wood and lightly pushed open the ajar door.
The utterly absurd scene that greeted her eyes made the great Dark Lord stop dead in her tracks, her jaw locking in sheer disbelief.
Bathed in the pale, cold moonlight filtering through the high windows, Harry Potter was crouching awkwardly beside his hospital bed. He was dressed in rumpled striped pajamas, his hand white-knuckled around his wand, pointing the tip unsteadily at a small, chewed-out rat hole in the corner of the baseboards. Even more ridiculous was the writhing mass at his bare feet. Several non-venomous grass snakes, Merlin only knew where he had caught them, were coiled together in a dense, hissing cluster.
"Go in... find that rat... bite it and bring it out for me..."
Harry was actually using Parseltongue, hissing and spitting syllables to command the tiny serpents to search the plumbing for the rat. To be entirely fair, Potter's pronunciation had improved slightly since their last encounter. It did not sound quite like a dying cat scraping against a chalkboard anymore.
But watching the supposed savior of the wizarding world squatting in a corner in his pajamas, issuing grand commands to garden snakes, caused a sharp throb of pain behind Tamara's eyes. She lifted a hand to rub her temples. The noble, ancient talent of the Heir of Slytherin was being used by this absolute buffoon like a third-rate snake charmer in a Muggle circus.
"What in the name of magic are you doing, Potter?" Tamara's voice sliced through the air, carrying an undisguised, heavy tone of disdain that sounded particularly abrupt in the cavernous ward.
Harry jumped, nearly dropping his wand as he whipped his head around. When his frantic green eyes landed on Tamara, the tension bled out of his shoulders. Instead of looking reprimanded, he excitedly lowered his voice and dug into the pocket of his pajama robes. He pulled out a small, vibrating metal object. It was the detection mirror Tamara had casually tossed to him days prior.
"Tamara! You're just in time!" Harry urgently shoved the glowing glass toward her. "This thing suddenly started burning hot and glowing a few minutes ago! The person who put the Jinx on my broom is back!" He swallowed hard, his expression hardening. "I'm certain it's that rat called Peter."
Tamara stared at the pulsing mirror. She drew in a breath, fully intending to unleash a barrage of harsh, cutting words to force this reckless Gryffindor back under his covers so he would stop interfering with her personal house-cleaning.
But the very second her lips parted, a sharp scratching sound echoed from the baseboards. A gray, twitching rat's head suddenly poked out from the jagged hole in the corner.
Tamara's breath hitched. In the rat's beady eyes, a cold, hyper-intelligent, and violently malicious light flickered—a gaze that absolutely did not belong to a mere animal.
Across the moonlit room, the gazes of two generations of Dark Lords met eerily in mid-air.
Tamara reacted with lethal speed. She whipped her wand forward, a vicious Incarcerous already forming on her tongue, aimed directly at the hole.
The rat, however, clearly understood the grim reality of its situation. The absolute moment it recognized Tamara's chilling aura, it decisively raised a tiny, clawed paw.
The air around the creature violently distorted.
It was a crude, desperate, but still silent and wandless Disillusionment Charm. Limited by the rat's incredibly narrow magical circuits, the light refraction of the spell was far from perfect—leaving a faint, shimmering blur—but it still effectively took hold. To cast such high-level magic without a wand while trapped in an Animagus animal form was a feat as difficult as plucking stars from the sky. Yet, at this moment, the terrifying magical talent belonging to Lord Voldemort was being displayed without reservation through this wretched, furry husk.
Knowing the internal pipes were already compromised by the snakes, the shimmering, invisible rat smoothly merged into the shadows of the room and slipped away along the base of the wall, making a mad dash for the open door.
"He's running!" Following the sudden shift in Tamara's murderous gaze, Harry keenly spotted the moving blur. He shouted anxiously, immediately letting out a rapid, aggressive string of hisses.
The grass snakes, which had been coiled and waiting, obediently slithered straight into the wall, using their dense, writhing bodies to completely block the rat's path from within, ensuring it could not duck back into the safety of the plumbing.
Tamara had zero patience for any more nonsense. The red tracking line floating in the air violently jerked, quickly extending out the door and toward the dark depths of the corridor. She spun on her heel, her robes billowing as she rushed out of the Hospital Wing in hot pursuit. Finding Tamara suddenly gone, Harry scrambled to his feet, raised his wand, and sprinted close behind her.
A truly bizarre midnight chase unfolded through the sleeping corridors of Hogwarts. The glowing tracking line bit hard onto the invisible rat's magical signature, pulling them forward. However, just as they skidded around the corner of the third floor, the red thread in mid-air suddenly snapped into an eerie U-turn, retreating back toward them even faster than it had fled.
"What's happening? Why is he turning back on his own?" Harry dug his bare heels into the stone floor, stopping in his tracks, utterly bewildered.
Tamara frowned deeply, the lethal spell at the tip of her wand glowing with unstable energy, ready to fire at the slightest movement.
The next second, a soft, airy humming drifted from the opposite end of the corridor.
Luna Lovegood, wearing an eye-wateringly bright yellow nightgown and casually holding a crude, homemade bug net, came drifting out of the shadows like a brightly colored ghost.
"Oh, good evening, Tamara." Luna stopped naturally, her large, silvery eyes blinking at them. She greeted the two panting students as if encountering an armed, murderous duo in the corridor at two in the morning was the most ordinary occurrence in the world.
"What are you doing here, Lovegood?" Tamara asked, a sharp headache beginning to pulse at her temples. She could practically feel her careful plan for the night sliding rapidly into an uncontrollable, chaotic abyss.
"I originally just intended to get up and use the bathroom," Luna explained with absolute seriousness, her head tilting slightly. "But while passing the corner, I happened to see the rat I mentioned to you last time."
Saying this, Luna proudly held up the strange contraption in her hand. "This is my homemade bug net. It's specially designed to catch creatures that are infested with a lot of Wrackspurts. I originally wanted to catch that rat to show you, but unfortunately, it ran far too fast."
'...'
Faced with such an entirely beyond understanding thought process, the Dark Lord took a slow, deep breath, forcibly swallowing the venomous, biting criticism that was already burning at the tip of her tongue. There were clearly far more pressing matters at hand than educating a Ravenclaw on late-night etiquette. She had no leisure to waste time here. Her sharp gaze quickly locked back onto the tracking line in mid-air, which had violently changed direction once again.
"We will talk later." Tamara dropped the words bluntly, not waiting for a reply as she unhesitatingly sprinted after the glowing thread.
And just like that, the midnight pursuit team grew from two people to three. Tamara marched at the front, her expression dark enough to curdle milk. Harry followed closely, his wand raised like a shield, while Luna leisurely skipped along at the very back, happily swinging her bug net.
'I really hope nothing else strange happens,' Tamara murmured under her breath, her eyes fixed on the red line she was rapidly gaining ground on.
However, the great Merlin clearly had a twisted sense of humor and seemed overjoyed to watch tonight's events descend into absolute farce.
Just as the trio sprinted past a sleeping portrait of the Fat Friar, they slammed head-on into two sneaky, crouching shadows.
"Merlin's beard! Who—Riddle?!"
Fred and George Weasley, who had been awkwardly scuttling along the base of the wall like oversized crabs, nearly leaped out of their skin. They slapped their hands over their own mouths to muffle their shouts of shock.
"...What are you two idiots doing out here in the middle of the night?" Tamara stared flatly at the ginger twins. They were supposed to be quietly stealing the map, not loitering in the corridors. She questioned them in a dangerously low, hissing whisper.
"Don't even mention it!" Fred whispered back, looking like he was on the verge of a breakdown. "We had already made our way straight to Professor Lupin's desk and were just about to grab the map, but it turns out the man wasn't sound asleep at all!"
"To avoid being caught red-handed, we had no choice but to climb out the bloody window and hang onto the ledge to observe quietly," George took up the story, his tone incredibly gloomy.
"And guess what? When Professor Lupin checked the Marauder's Map, he seemed to suddenly spot something absolutely incredible on it. He bolted out of his office without even bothering to change out of his pajamas!"
The twins looked around the dim corridor guiltily, half-expecting the Defense Against the Dark Arts professor to suddenly materialize from the shadows and haul them all off to the dungeons for a month of detention.
But as their identical gazes slowly swept over Tamara's icy glare, Harry's frantic panting, and Luna's cheerful yellow nightgown... the bizarre composition of the group clearly transmitted a very specific signal to their prankster brains.
"Wait a second..." Fred lowered his hands, raising an eyebrow excitedly. "What kind of brilliant midnight outing is this, and why didn't you invite us?!"
"Since everyone is clearly wide awake anyway..." George grinned, naturally squeezing his way right into the middle of the group. "It would be an absolute crime to miss out on the excitement. Count us in!"
Tamara had absolutely no mind left to drive away these grinning idiots who were now tagging along. The glow of the red line in mid-air had become dangerously faint, proving their target was rapidly increasing the distance between them. Time was of the essence. She didn't even spare the twins half a glance, directly stepping forward and breaking into a dead sprint after the receding light.
The five of them charged grandly toward the end of the fourth-floor corridor.
Just then, the crisp, violent sound of shattering glass exploded through the silent castle.
Tamara's pupils shrank. She pushed her legs harder, picking up her pace.
When the five of them finally rushed around the final corner, panting heavily, the scene before them froze in an eerie tableau.
The large, ornate stained-glass window at the very end of the corridor had been completely smashed through. The piercing, biting wind of early spring whipped through the jagged hole, sending scattered glass shards skittering across the stone floor.
Standing right in front of the destruction was the new Defense Against the Dark Arts professor, Remus Lupin. He was wearing his worn, patched robes over his pajamas, his hands tightly gripping a large piece of seemingly blank parchment. He stood frozen by the shattered window, staring incredulously out into the pitch-black night.
And floating in mid-air, Tamara's red tracking line extended straight out through the broken glass, stretching far across the grounds until it finally disappeared into the distant, dark edge of the Forbidden Forest.
Hearing the loud, messy clatter of footsteps behind him, Lupin slowly turned around.
There, standing in the corridor:
Tamara, radiating an icy, murderous aura while tightly clutching her wand.
Harry, flushed and in a state of breathless excitement.
Luna, looking perfectly innocent while holding up her homemade bug net.
And the Weasley twins, desperately trying to shrink into the shadows at the very back, pretending they were merely innocent passersby taking a midnight stroll.
The six of them stared at each other. The suffocating, awkward silence lasted for a full five seconds.
Finally, it was Luna who politely broke the dead silence.
"Good evening, Professor Lupin." Luna took a small, dainty step forward. She looked up at the still-dazed professor and pointed a slender finger toward the shattered window. "Excuse me, but did you just happen to see a rat covered in Wrackspurts jump out of here?"
"Wrack... what?"
Lupin's brain was clearly still short-circuiting, desperately trying to process the impossible conflict between the dead man's name he had just seen on the Marauder's Map and the reality before his eyes. Faced with Luna's completely unconventional question, the usually articulate and gentle professor actually stuttered.
But he was a responsible teacher, after all. After two seconds of being utterly stunned, the logic and reason belonging to an adult wizard finally reclaimed the high ground. Lupin quickly crumpled the parchment and stuffed it deep into his robe pocket. His tired, lined face immediately shifted into a stern, authoritative expression.
"Wait..." Lupin took a deep, steadying breath, his sharp gaze sweeping over the five students who were very much supposed to be in bed. "Potter? Lovegood? Weasley? And... Miss Riddle?"
He raised his volume, his voice tinged with an undisguisable mix of deep shock and a rapidly forming headache. He truly could not fathom how these five specific individuals had managed to form a group.
"What in the world are you all doing out in the fourth-floor corridor in the middle of the night instead of sleeping in your dormitories?!"
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