"Are you asking me out on a date or threatening me?"
"How about threatening you with good time?"
Zoe Black is irresponsible, fun-loving, surprisingly intelligent and very charming. Her life is shadowed by the haunting legacy of her murderous fathe...
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A FLASH OF WHITE LIGHT SPLASHED MOMENTARILY across the dark sky as if someone had turned the lights on when Fred, George, Lee and Zoe stepped out of the train into the slippery, wet platform.
"Woah."
"If I don't win a wet t-shirt competition after having to stand in this rain, I'm going to complain to someone." Lee said, pretending to sound very frustrated, making light of the annoying situation.
Zoe couldn't remember the last time she had had to stand in such a hard rain. It felt as though ice-cold water buckets were being repeatedly poured over their heads.
A hundred horseless carriages stood waiting for them outside the Hogmeade's station. The friend group of four gratefully climbed into one of them, shivering.
Their carriage came to a halt before the great oak front doors, which stood at the top of a flight of stone steps. They dashed the steps up, while slipping to their feet, following their fellow peers to inside the torch-lit Entrance Hall.
Fred, George, Lee and Zoe came just in time to see insanely cackling Peeves stuck his tongue out, throw water bombs into the air and zoom off up the marble staircase.
"Well, move along, then!" they heard a familiar sharp voice, which belonged to no other than Professor McGonagall saying sharply to the bedraggled crowd. "Into the Great Hall, come on!"
"Well, Peeves does start early, you have to give that to him." Fred smirked, looking after the poltergeist.
The four slid to the Great Hall and sat to their usual spots around the Gryffindor table, while greeting the fellow pupils on the way. There were already great puddles breaking out underneath their shoes as the water dripped down from their wet clothes.
"Where's the new Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher?" Lee wondered, looking up at the staff table.
The rest three followed his gaze. Lee was right: there were three empty seats in the teacher's table. Hagrid, who was sailing through the storm with the new first-years, Professor McGonagall was ready to supervise them when they would arrive, but there was another yet empty chair, that was presumably for the new Defence Against the Dark Teacher.
"Maybe he's late."
Gryffindor received the new students with great applause to make them feel welcomed. Zoe hadn't even thought that it was possible but the boat ride in the rain through the lake seemed to have treated the first-years ten times as bad as it had been to the rest of them. One of the them, apparently, had actually fell into the Black lake. He seemed positively delighted about it, though.
After the Sorting Hat had sorted the all new first-years to their houses, Zoe felt very delighted because she knew that the eating part of the feast was coming up.
