star-crossed

Chocolate Frog Cards Save the Day

Dumbledore had convinced the Twins not to go looking for the Mirror of Erised again and they didn't. For the rest of the Christmas holidays, the Invisibility Cloak stayed folded at the bottom of Harry's trunk. Harry wished he could forget what he'd seen in the Mirror as easily, but he couldn't.

The twins took to sleeping next to each other in the common room after they started having nightmares. Over and over again they dreamed about their parents disappearing, the same flash of bright green and high cold laughter from their childhood memories — they knew now that this was the Killing Curse and Voldemort, and it haunted them.

"You see, Dumbledore was right, that mirror could drive you mad," said Ron, when Harry told him about these dreams.

Hermione, who came back the day before term started, took a different view of things. She was torn between horror at the idea of the twins being out of bed, roaming the school three nights in a row ("If Filch had caught you!") and disappointment that they hadn't at least found out who Nicolas Flamel was.

In fact, the Sprigs had almost given up hope of ever finding Flamel in a library book, even though Harry was still sure he'd read the name somewhere. Once term had started, they were back to skimming through books for ten minutes during their breaks. Harry had even less time than the other five, because Quidditch practice had started again.

Wood was working the team harder than ever. Even the endless rain that had replaced the snow couldn't dampen his spirits. The Weasleys complained that Wood was becoming a fanatic, but Harry was on Wood's side. If they won their next match, against Hufflepuff, they would overtake Slytherin in the House Championship for the first time in seven years. Quite apart from wanting to win, Harry found that he had fewer nightmares when he was tired out after training.

Then, during one particularly wet and muddy practice session, Wood gave the team a bit of bad news. He'd just got very angry with the Weasleys, who kept dive-bombing each other and pretending to fall off their brooms.

"Will you stop messing around?!" he yelled. "That's exactly the sort of thing that'll lose us the match! Snape's refereeing this time, and he'll be looking for any excuse to knock points off Gryffindor!"

George really did fall off his broom at these words.

"Snape's refereeing?" he spluttered, covered in mud. "When's he ever refereed a Quidditch match? He's not going to be fair if we might overtake Slytherin."

The rest of the team landed next to George to complain, too.

"It's not my fault," said Wood. "We've just got to make sure we play a clean game, so Snape hasn't got an excuse to pick on us."

Which was all very well, thought Harry, but he had another reason for not wanting Snape near him while he was playing Quidditch. Though Draco maintained that Snape wouldn't have cursed his broom and in fact was countercursing, Harry remained convinced Snape was trying to kill him.

The rest of the team hung back to talk to each other as usual at the end of practice, but Harry headed straight back to the Gryffindor common room, where he found Elowen playing solitaire with an Exploding Snap deck and Ron and Hermione playing chess at the next table. Chess was the only thing Hermione ever lost at, something they all thought was very good for her.

"Don't talk to me for a moment," said Ron when Harry sat down next to him. "I need to concen—"He caught sight of Harry's face. "What's the matter with you? You look terrible."

"Real nice, Ron," Elowen said, cursing and dropping one of her cards as it exploded. She looked over at Harry and set her deck down. "He's right, though, you look awful."