An Heir

Part Thirty One- Chasing the Ginger Cat

The next day I spoke with Professor McGonagall about Harry’s Firebolt and was abruptly told how it was none of my business. The next week school started up and as a pre-requisite of me sitting my O.W.L’s I had to attend several fifth year classes. Of course Professor Lupin had still been giving me private lessons and I suppose I could’ve asked him what Sthyss had meant in saying that there could be something worse than death but I’d decided that I would look for it myself. I didn’t find it until several weeks later when I saw a familiar face screaming up at me from the Daily Prophet. Sirius had been sentenced to something called the Dementor’s Kiss. Of course I ran straight to the library and pulled out the book I’d read a bit from at the beginning of the year when the Dementors had first arrived.

“The Dementors Kiss-

            Those who are sentenced to such a severe fate have been declared and proven guilty of the crimes they have committed, by the Court and Wizengamot, such a brutal sentence is necessary to combat the brutality of the crime.

No sane mind has ever examined the Dementor at close range; and what lies beneath the hood of a Dementor is precisely why we know so little about how the Dementor’s Kiss.

The Kiss itself is often performed in a secluded place as is Ministry regulation due to the horrific nature of this, most final sentence…”

I scanned the next page and found the section all about the removal of a person’s soul, leaving the victim alive but completely annulled to the world around them.

I couldn’t restrain the shiver that crept down my spine.

Consequently the discovery of my cousins looming fate had me in an awful mood for the rest of the day, so bad was my depression that I forgot that it was Thursday. Under the assumption that it was Wednesday and that I had private lessons with Lupin I headed towards his office. I knocked on the door and frowned at the lack of answer, I looked into my bag and of course just staring up at me was the work I’d done today, all dated and blatantly screaming my error.

I huffed loudly and threw my bag down on the ground next to the office door and leant on the window sill in a definite bad mood.

I thought about my friends and how I hadn’t seen Harry recently, him and Ron had of course been there in class along with Hermione but outside of class I hadn’t seen them. Hermione was far too busy with all her school work and I probably should have been too.

The classes for my O.W.L. subjects were demanding, and the homework, on top of all my other extra work was finally becoming too much for me to merely keep busy with.  

I was taking Potions, Defence Against the Dark Arts, Charms, Transfiguration, Herbology, History of Magic, Arithmancy and Astronomy at O.W.L. and though the practical side of it I found a doddle, learning everything I had to know on the theory side was proving to be hard work.

Even though all my teachers knew how much work I was going to have to put into my O.W.L.’s, only one had protested against me taking the exams. Snape of course had found some sort of problem with giving me permission stating that ‘given my condition and lack of regard for my Professor’s’ there was no way that I could take on that amount of work in such a short time. Well I’d show Professor Snape.

Glowering out into the dark I forced myself to calm down and took a deep, soothing breath. There was mist covering the ground outside the castle and it looked thick enough to walk on- almost like a thin, floating layer of yoghurt.

I turned back from the window and just caught a blur of ginger in the corner of my eye.

Knowing that it was Crookshanks and wondering what he was doing out of the Gryffindor commons at this time of night I hopped down the corridor after him, just following him out of the main body of the school in time to see him slip through the front doors to the Entrance Hall and into the night shrouded grounds.