Invisible String - Sebastian Sallow

Chapter Eleven: The Imperius Curse

Monday rolled around far too quickly for my liking. I had spent most of Sunday avoiding everyone. I'd written to Anne as Sebastian had asked, the scroll of parchment rolled tightly to a tawny owls leg, and spent the rest of the day in solitude.

Sebastian's words kept echoing around my head as I showered and dressed, bouncing around until they knocked every other thought from my head.

"I never thought you did."

He'd left so quickly after that, his cloak whipping around the corner and out of sight of our little cove before I even had a chance to reply to him. I was so unclear on what answers that statement gave me.

Did he think me a monster because I didn't regret what I had done? Or did he see what I was holding myself back from becoming? Did he see me?

I glanced in the mirror one final time. I looked okay, I supposed. I'd barely slept, the bags under my eyes prominent against my flushed skin, my cosmetics doing little to hide that. My hair at least looked okay, last nights braid helping give a gentle curl. My uniform was neatly pressed still, the silk green of my tie almost glinting in the light of our lake windows.

It's time to face the day, Abbi.

I left the bathroom, my robes swishing around the corner as I snatched my bag from the bench just outside and tromped my way through the common room, my own personal dark cloud hanging over my head. I saw Ominis leaning against the fireplace, his head tilted down towards his feet, my somber mood apparently not exclusive.

Today was our second Defense Against the Dark Arts class. And we were sure to be starting our learning of the curses today. We had no way of knowing what we would be walking into today, and clearly it was affecting two of our party. Sebastian was nowhere to be seen.

"I never thought you did."

He echoed around my head again as I looked at Ominis. My heart tugged in a painful way and I shook myself. Making a note to talk to Ominis as soon as the opportunity presented itself, I climbed the stone staircase out of the common room. I pulled Poppy's notebook from my bag and flicked through it as I walked, trying to distract myself from red rimmed brown eyes and flashes of green light.

Poppy's notebook helped more than I expected and I was in the great hall before long, my eyes still lost in the yellowing pages, searching for anything that might be useful. I sat in my same spot from the first day of term at the end of the table, grabbing a stack of pancakes and fruit before losing myself in the pages again.

I was in the middle of reading about a Poacher camp on the outskirts of Paris when I saw the same symbol scratched into the bottom left of the page. It was smaller than the one Poppy had shown me when we went to Hogsmead, barely larger than a blot of ink and I quickly flicked through all of the pages searching for the page in question.

If I was right, this camp was moving from France, and that meant they were definitely connected to the group in the Hogs Head.

But where they a smaller faction or the whole group?

I felt the bench dip next to me and I nodded at whoever it was, eyes not moving from the pages I was rifling through, expecting them to just leave me to my somber mood.

"Abbi," the voice hissed at me.

I whipped my head up, slightly surprised. Poppy had plopped herself next to me, at the Slytherin table. A few of her Hufflepuff friends shot her confused looks but I glared them off.

"Poppy- you startled me," I laughed at her. "I was just looking at this."

She thrust a handful of notes my way, nodding to the notebook in my hands. "I've found more!"