Harry Potter's Coolest Aunt

Knight bus

Don't be a silent reader

Aishi was several streets away before she collapsed onto a low wall in Magnolia Crescent, panting from the effort of dragging her heavy dress. She sat quite still, anger still surging through her, listening to the frantic thumping of her heart.

But after ten minutes alone in the dark street, a new emotion overtook her: panic. Whichever way she looked at it, she had never been in a worse fix. She was stranded, quite alone, in the dark Muggle world, with absolutely nowhere to go.

And the worst of it was, she had just done serious magic, which meant that he was almost certainly expelled from Hogwarts. She had broken the Decree for the Restriction of Underage Wizardry so badly, that she was surprised Ministry of Magic representatives weren't swooping down on him where he sat.

Aishi shivered wishing she brought a jacket as she rubbed her shoulders and looked up and down Magnolia Crescent. What, was going to happen to her? Would she be arrested, or would she simply be outlawed from the wizarding world? She thought of her friends and Harry, and her heart sank even lower.

She had no means of contacting them. He didn't have enough Muggle money, either. There was a little wizard gold in her dress pocket

She looked down at her wand, which she was still clutching in her hand. If
She was already expelled (her heart was. now thumping painfully fast), and a
bit more magic couldn't hurt. 

Then a funny prickling on the back of his neck had made Aishi feel she was being watched, but the street appeared to be deserted, and no lights shone from any of the large square houses.

Her hand clenched on his wand. She had sensed rather than heard it:
someone or something was standing in the narrow gap between the garage and the fence behind her. Aishi squinted at the black alleyway. If only it would move, then he'd know whether it was just a stray cat or -- something else.

"Lumos," Aishi muttered, and a light appeared at the end of her wand, almost dazzling her. She held it high over her head, and the pebble-dashed walls of number two suddenly sparkled; the garage door gleamed, and between them, Aishi saw, quite distinctly, the hulking
outline of something very big, with wide, gleaming eyes.

Aishi stepped backwards. Her legs hit the pavement and she tripped. Her wand flew out of his hand as she flung out an arm to break her fall, and she landed, hard, in the gutter --
There was a deafening BANG, and Aishi threw up her hands to shield her eyes against a sudden blinding light -- With a yell, she rolled back onto the pavement, just in time. A second later, a gigantic pair of wheels and headlights screeched to a halt exactly where Aishi had just been lying.

They belonged, as Aishi saw when she raised her head, to a triple-decker, violently purple bus, which had appeared out of thin air. Gold lettering over the windshield spelled The Knight Bus.

For a Split second, Aishi wondered if she had been knocked silly by her
fall. Then a conductor in a purple uniform leapt out of the bus and
began to speak loudly to the night.
"Welcome to the Knight Bus, emergency transport for the stranded witch or wizard. just stick out your wand hand, and step on board) and we can take you anywhere you want to go. My name is Stan Shunpike, and I will be your conductor this eve --"

The conductor stopped abruptly. He had just caught sight of "Aishi, who
was still sitting on the ground. Aishi snatched up her wand again and
scrambled to her feet. Close up, she saw that Stan Shunpike was only a
few years older than she was, eighteen or nineteen at most, with large, protruding ears and quite a few pimples.

"What were you doin' down there?" said Stan, dropping his professional
manner. "Fell over," said Aishi."'Choo fall over for?" sniggered Stan. "I didn't do it on purpose," said Aishi. One of the knees was scratched, a bit of her dress ripped, and the hand she had thrown out to break his fall was bleeding.