DEXTERITY | S. BLACK

09.

      "FIND ANYTHING yet?" the dark-haired girl asked Snape, glancing into the book he was skimming through.

     "If I did, Nott, I would have mentioned something by now."

     It had been four days since she had been cursed. No potion could numb the searing pain in her left arm and, as each day went by, it only seemed to get worse. Emma, the captain of Slytherin's quidditch team, planned on having practice every morning and afternoon leading up the match against Ravenclaw, and Callista was running out of excuses for her subpar quidditch skills.

     "I understand that it's difficult," she pleaded, scooting closer to the hooked-nosed boy, "but you've got to understand, if I get kicked out of the team, Slughorn's going to ask what happened and then it'll just end with people finding out what Pollux did."

     "There's only one quick method to find the cure," Snape told her, though his expression warned against it.

     "Anything, Snape. Just look at this." She motioned to her arm, hanging loosely at her side. "I'm desperate."

     "You'll have to be prepared to excuse a lot of the things you'll see."

     "What? Why?"

     Snape pondered upon his next words before saying, "We're going to study a bit of the Dark Arts."

     Callista blinked. "What?"

     "Let's be realistic here, Nott," Snape began, leading her out of the library. "You and I both know that Pollux used some sort of dark magic against you, so what better way to fix the problem?"

     Perhaps she should have been more reluctant to follow him but, with a quidditch match around the corner, Callista couldn't risk getting caught by someone in authority. "Can you get it done by Saturday?"

"It depends," Snape told her, muttering the password to the common room under his breath. "If anything, we should have enough time on Friday."

"Right," Callista nodded, as she recalled seeing obnoxious red and white hearts around the castle. She dropped her bag and took a seat at the far corner. "Don't got me wrong, Snape, I'm not suddenly interested in the Dark Arts, but where do we start? Where to we go to start? There's s—"

"Relax," he said with a sneer, taking the seat opposite her. "You seem to have forgotten who you're talking to here."

He pulled out a few dusty-looking books from his bag and placed them on the table. Callista glanced at them suspiciously. Although she was desperate, she was very aware that what she was doing was wrong, and the sinking feeling in her stomach wasn't helping.

"They don't bite," he stated, mild amusement lacing his words as he shoved half of them in front of her.

     "The last time I checked," she retorted, using her wand to poke one of the books that appeared to be several hundred years old, "books relating to the Dark Arts could, indeed, bite."

     Rather than taking the risk of touching the book herself, she quietly uttered an incantation in a failed attempt to open it. Snape regarded Callista with barely concealed annoyance as he slammed his hand onto the book, startling her. Without breaking eye contact, he slowly turned the cover.

     "Was that hard?" he questioned, mockingly.

     She didn't respond, choosing instead to scan the pages for any information on Pollux's curse. The words were in Latin and, though she could barely understand it, she knew enough to figure out the gist of what they were saying. She and Snape sat there for hours, pouring over old manuscripts but were unsuccessful in finding anything that would help her.