Faith .|. H. J. POTTER ✔

Chapter one-hundred-twenty-four

"What d'you reckon happened to the Cattermoles?" Ron spoke up when they were all sipping the hot tea Hermione made them in silence, lost in their own thoughts. 

"With any luck, they'll have got away," Hermione said, warming her hands around her mug. "As long as Mr Cattermole had wits about him, he'll have transported Mrs Cattermole by Side-Along-Apparition and they'll be fleeing the country right now with their children. It's the smart thing to do,"

"Blimey, I hope they escaped," Ron said as he stared to the bunk bed above him. Faith smiled at him, lost in her own thoughts. Ron had such a big heart but people seemed to rarely notice. "I didn't get the feeling Reg Cattermole was all the quick-witted, though, the way everyone was talking to me when I was him. God, I hope they made it ... if they both end up in Azkaban because of us ..."

None of them wanted to think about that possibility. 

Hermione was now staring at Ron in such a tender and loving expression, Faith instantly knew how she felt about Ron. Harry told her about how he felt about her millions of times and Faith had caught him with that same expression looking at her on multiple occasions. 

"Could they be any more obvious?" Faith whispered in Harry's ear, making him look at Hermione too. 

"So have you got it?" Harry asked Hermione.

"Got - got what?" Hermione asked startled as she tore her eyes away from Ron - and action that made both Harry and Faith smirk at her. 

"What did we just go through all that for? The locket! Where's the locket?"

"You got it?" Ron exclaimed rather loudly as he shot up from the bed. "No one tells me anything! Blimey, you could have mentioned it!"

"We were running for our lives from the Death Eaters, weren't we?" Faith chuckled at Ron.

"Here," Hermione pulled it from her pocket and handed it to Ron. He held it up in the light so he could see if it really was the one they had been after.

"There isn't any chance someone's destroyed it since Kreacher had it?" Ron asked the other three hopefully. "I mean, are we sure it's still a Horcrux?"

"I think so," Hermione nodded sadly, passing it over to Harry and Faith. "There'd be some signs of damage if it had been magically destroyed,"

Harry and Faith looked at the silver locket in Harry's hand, suddenly very aware that they were looking at the holder of a part of Voldemort's soul. It freaked them out for a moment, both feeling a wave of panic come over them and a sudden urge to throw the thing away from them as far as possible. 

"I reckon Kreacher's right," Harry finally said with a gulp. "We're going to have to work out how to open this thing before we can destroy whatever is in it," He took his wand from his pocket and began to mutter every spell he knew that could possibly open things but nothing worked. 

"Let me try," Faith said, taking the locket from Harry's hand. "I think it needs a bit of force to open," Before Harry could stop her, she tossed the locket in the air once and then threw it with the same force as she'd throw a Quaffle during a match. The locket soared through the air before hitting one of the poles that held up the canvas roof with a loud thud, and then it fell to the ground. 

Nothing had happened to it. 

"Good one," Ron commented as Hermione picked it up from the floor.

"You'd think that would do some kind of damage but there's not even a little dent or as much as a speck of dust," Hermione frowned at it before pulling her wand out and trying some more spells and charms, but nothing worked. "Well, what are we going to do with it?"