Previously called TWO OF THE SAME
❝ It's better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all. ❞
Living with her godmother, Dorcas Meadows, and her uncle, Remus Lupin, 𝐇𝐀𝐑𝐏𝐄𝐑 𝐋𝐈𝐋𝐘 𝐏𝐎𝐓𝐓𝐄𝐑 lives a pretty good life. That's unt...
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SUMMER WAS CREEPING OVER THE GROUNDS AROUND THE CASTLE; large as cabbage burst into bloom in the greenhouses. But with no Hagrid visible from the castle windows, striding the grounds with Fang at his heels, the scene didn't look right to Harper; no better, in fact, than the inside of the castle, where things were so horribly wrong.
Harry, Ron and Harper had tried to visit Hermione, but visitors were now barred from the Hospital Wing.
"We're taking no more chances," Madam Pomfrey told them severely through a crack in the hospital door. "No, I'm sorry, there's every chance the attacker might come back to finish these people off . . ."
With Dumbledore gone, fear had spread as never before, so that the sun warming the castle walls outside seemed to stop at the mullioned windows. There was barely a face to be seen in the school that didn't look worried and tense, and any laughter that rang through the corridors sounded shrill and unnatural and was quickly stifled.
Harper constantly repeated Dumbledore's final words to herself—as if they would somehow make everything all right.
"I will only truly have left this school when none here are loyal to me . . . Help will always be given at Hogwarts to those who ask for it."
But what good were these words? Who exactly were they supposed to ask for help, when everyone was just as confused and scared as they were?
Hagrid's hint about the spiders was far easier to understand—the trouble was, there didn't seem to be a single spider left in the castle to follow. Harry and Harper looked everywhere they went, helped (rather reluctantly) by Ron. They were hampered, of course, by the fact that they weren't allowed to wander off on their own, but had to move around the castle in a pack with the other Gryffindors. Most of their fellow students seemed glad that they were being shepherded from class to class by teachers, but Harper found it very irksome.
One person, however, seemed to be thoroughly enjoying the atmosphere of terror and suspicion. Draco Malfoy was strutting around the school at though he had just been appointed Head Boy. Harper didn't realize what he was so pleased about until the Potions lesson about a fortnight after Dumbledore and Hagrid had left, when, sitting right behind Malfoy, she overheard him gloating to Crabbe and Goyle.
