The girl who died Harry Potter's Twin Sister

Chapter 6- OOTP

"Mum says get up, your breakfast is in the kitchen and then she needs you in the drawing-room, there are loads more Doxys than she thought," Fred says to Ron and Harry.

Half an hour later Harry and Ron, who had dressed and breakfasted quickly, entered the drawing-room, a long, high-ceilinged room on the first floor with olive green walls covered in dirty tapestries. The carpet exhaled little clouds of dust every time someone put their foot on it and the long, moss green velvet curtains were buzzing as though swarming with invisible bees. It was around these that Mrs Weasley, Hermione, Elizabeth, Ginny, Fred and George were grouped, all looking rather peculiar as they had each tied a cloth over their nose and mouth. Each of them was also holding a large bottle of black liquid with a nozzle at the end. "Cover your faces and take a spray," Mrs Weasley says to Harry and Ron the moment she saw them, pointing to two more bottles of black liquid standing on a spindle-legged table. "It's a Doxycide. I've never seen an infestation this bad - what that house-elf's been doing for the last ten years -"

Hermione's face was half concealed by a tea towel but Harry distinctly saw her throw a reproachful look at Mrs Weasley. "Kreacher's really old, he probably couldn't manage -"

"You'd be surprised what Kreacher can manage when he wants to, Hermione," says Sirius, who had just entered the room carrying a bloodstained bag of what appeared to be dead rats. "I've just been feeding Buckbeak," he adds, in reply to Harry's enquiring look. "I keep him upstairs in my mother's bedroom. Anyway... this writing desk..." He dropped the bag of rats into an armchair, then bent over to examine the locked cabinet which, Harry now notices for the first time, was shaking slightly. "Well, Molly, I'm pretty sure this is a Boggart," says Sirius, peering through the keyhole, "but perhaps we ought to let Mad-Eye have a shifty at it before we let it out - knowing my mother, it could be something much worse."

"Right you are, Sirius," says Mrs Weasley. They were both speaking in carefully light, polite voices that told Harry quite plainly that neither had forgotten their disagreement of the night before. A loud, clanging bell sounded from downstairs, followed at once by the cacophony of screams and wails that had been triggered the previous night by Tonks knocking over the umbrella stand.

"I keep telling them not to ring the doorbell!" said Sirius exasperatedly, hurrying out of the room. They heard him thundering down the stairs as Mrs Black's screeches echoed up through the house once more: "Stains, of dishonour, filthy half-breeds, blood traitors, children of filth"

"Close the door, please, Harry," said Mrs Weasley. Harry took as much time as he dared to close the drawing-room door; he wanted to listen to what was going on downstairs. Sirius had obviously managed to shut the curtains over his mother's portrait because she had stopped screaming. He heard Sirius walking down the hall, then the clattering of the chain on the front door, and then a deep voice he recognized as Kingsley Shacklebolt's saying, "Hestia's just relieved me, so she's got Moody's Cloak now, thought I'd leave a report for Dumbledore..." Feeling Mrs Weasley's eyes on the back of his head, Harry regretfully closed the drawing-room door and rejoined the Doxy party.

Mrs Weasley was bending over to check the page on Doxys in Gilderoy Lockhart's Guide to Household Pests, which was lying open on the sofa. "Right, you lot, you need to be careful, because Doxys bite and their teeth are poisonous. I've got a bottle of antidote here, but I'd rather nobody needed it." She straightened up, positioned herself squarely in front of the curtains and beckoned them all forward.

"When I say the word, start spraying immediately," she said. "They'll come flying out at us, I expect, but it says on the sprays one good squirt will paralyze them. When they're immobilized, just throw them in this bucket." She stepped carefully out of their line of fire and raised her own spray.

"All right - squirt!" Harry had been spraying only a few seconds when a fully-grown Doxy came soaring out of a fold in the material, shiny beetle-like wings whirring, tiny needle-sharp teeth bared, its fairy-like body covered with thick black hair and its four tiny fists clenched with fury. Harry caught it full in the face with a blast of Doxycide. It froze in midair and fell, with a surprisingly loud hunk, on to the worn carpet below. Harry picked it up and threw it in the bucket.

"Fred, what are you doing?" said Mrs Weasley sharply. "Spray that at once and throw it away!" Harry looked around. Fred was holding a struggling Doxy between his forefinger and thumb.

"Right-o,' Fred said brightly, spraying the Doxy quickly in the face so that it fainted, but the moment Mrs Weasley's back was turned he pocketed it with a wink.

"We want to experiment with Doxy venom for our Skiving Snack boxes," George told Harry under his breath. Deftly spraying two Doxys at once as they soared straight for his nose, Harry moved closer to George and muttered out of the corner of his mouth, "What are Skiving Snack boxes?"

"Range of sweets to make you ill," George whispered, keeping a wary eye on Mrs Weasley's back. "Not seriously ill, mind, just ill enough to get you out of a class when you feel like it. Fred and I have been developing them this summer. They're double-ended, colour-coded chews. If you eat the orange half of the Puking Pastilles, you throw up. The moment you've been rushed out of the lesson for the hospital wing, you swallow the purple half –"

"which restores you to full fitness, enabling you to pursue the leisure activity of your own choice during an hour that would otherwise have been devoted to unprofitable boredom. That's what we're putting in the adverts, anyway," whispered Fred, who had edged over out of Mrs Weasley's line of vision and was now sweeping a few stray Doxys from the floor and adding them to his pocket. "But they still need a bit of work. At the moment our testers are having a bit of trouble stopping puking long enough to swallow the purple end."

"Testers?"

"Us," said Fred. "We take it in turns. George did the Fainting Fancies - we both tried the Nosebleed Nougat -"

"Mum thought we'd been duelling," said George.

"Joke shop still on, then?" Harry muttered, pretending to be adjusting the nozzle on his spray.

"Well, we haven't had a chance to get premises yet," said Fred, dropping his voice even lower as Mrs Weasley mopped her brow with her scarf before returning to the attack, "so we're running it as a mail-order service at the moment. We put advertisements in the Daily Prophet last week."

"All thanks to you, mate," said George. "But don't worry... Mum hasn't got a clue. She won't read the Daily Prophet any more, 'cause of it telling lies about you and Dumbledore." Harry grinned. He had forced the Weasley twins to take the thousand Galleons prize money he had won in the Triwizard Tournament to help them realize their ambition to open a joke shop, but he was still glad to know that his part in furthering their plans was unknown to Mrs Weasley. She did not think running a joke shop was a suitable career for two of her sons. The de-Doxying of the curtains took most of the morning. It was past midday when Mrs Weasley finally removed her protective scarf, sank into a sagging armchair and sprang up again with a cry of disgust, having sat on the bag of dead rats. The curtains were no longer buzzing; they hung limp and damp from the intensive spraying. At the foot of them, unconscious Doxyslay crammed in the bucket beside a bowl of their black eggs, at which Crookshanks was now sniffing and Fred and George were shooting covetous looks.