Brighter Than the Sun

Chapter Eighty-Three

I felt my feet slam into the ground. Harry fell over due to his injured leg, causing Cedric and I to go down with him.

"Where are we?" he wondered.

Cedric shook his head. We got up, pulled Harry to his feet, and looked around. Luke must have been left behind; he was nowhere to be found. We had left the Hogwarts grounds completely and had obviously traveled miles. Even the mountains surrounding the castle were gone. We were standing instead in a dark and overgrown graveyard; the black outline of a small church was visible beyond a large yew tree to our right. A hill rose above us to our left. I could just make out the outline of an old house on the hillside.

Cedric looked down at the Triwizard Cup and then up at Harry and I.

"Did anyone tell you the cup was a Portkey?" he asked me.

"No," I said.

Harry looked around the graveyard. "Is this supposed to be part of the task?"

"I don't think so," I replied. "Luke would've told me, he planned it out..."

"Wands out, d'you reckon?" Cedric asked nervously.

"Yeah," Harry and I agreed. We pulled out our wands. I had the strange feeling that we were being watched. Then I heard footsteps.

"Someone's coming," I warned them suddenly.

Squinting tensely through the darkness, we watched a figure drawing nearer, walking steadily toward us between the graves. I couldn't make out a face, but from the way it was walking and holding its arms, I could tell that it was carrying something. Whoever it was, they were short, and wearing a hooded cloak pulled up over their head to obscure their face. And, several paces nearer, I noticed the thing in the person's arms looked like a baby ... or was it merely a bundle of robes?

Harry lowered his wand slightly and glanced sideways at me. Cedric shot me a quizzical look. Both boys seemed to be looking to me for an idea of what to do, but I didn't have a clue either. I turned back to watch the approaching figure.

They stopped beside a towering marble headstone, only six feet from us. For a second, we all simply looked at one another.

And then, without warning, Harry dropped his wand and fell to his knees, grabbing his head. From the bundled-up robes, I heard a high, cold voice say, "Kill the spare."

A swishing noise and a second voice, which screeched the words to the night: "Avada Kedavra!"

A blast of green light blazed right toward us; it streaked past me and right into Cedric, hitting him in the chest before any of us could react. Cedric seemed to fall in slow motion, landing spread-eagled on the ground beside me.

Recovering from the shock, I raced to his side and placed two fingers on his neck behind his left ear, where his thyroid artery would be. There was no pulse. I pushed up his sleeve and felt his wrist for a pulse, but there was nothing there either.

For a second that contained an eternity, I stared into Cedric's face, at his open gray eyes, blank and expressionless as the windows of a deserted house, at his half-open mouth, which looked slightly surprised.

I'd been tasked with protecting him. This was the second time I'd failed, and this time it was for real. Cedric was not coming back from this. He was dead.

"No," I breathed, unable to believe he was really gone. "No, no, no..."

This wasn't the demigod world. This was the wizarding world. People weren't supposed to be killed, not in tournaments like this.

"Ash!"

At Harry's voice, I whipped around; the short man in the cloak had put down his bundle, lit his wand, and was dragging Harry toward the marble headstone. I wouldn't be able to do anything for Cedric, but if Harry died, that was on me as well.