We Will Shine {Book 6 in the Star of Gryffindor Series}

Chapter 50 - Just Seer Things

~Astra~

We didn't find much new about most of the children, but the five who had been missing from the files Teddy had pulled at the auror office were more promising. We knew the names of two of them, Cassie and an eleven-year-old boy named Ryder Portland. There were dozens of articles about each of them, about the vicious murders of their families. They were the first two disappearances, and the sloppiest, Poppy observed. At some point, they'd started trying to make everything look like an accident, with a lot of house fires or carbon monoxide leaks, but the murders of the Williams and Portland families were gruesome enough to have made the news for several weeks, until hope of finding the children had waned enough to let the stories fade.

Cassie had been in her first year of primary school. Her family had been sweet people, according to their neighbors, though a little closed off, especially the little girl. Cassie's teacher called her precocious and very independent. She was smart, but a little odd, it seemed, and always daydreaming. I mean, that made sense, considering it seemed like she was probably a witch and a seer. I'd never been called smart as a kid, but odd? For sure. Poppy said that matched up with what her primary school teachers had said about her, then her younger brother, too.

Ryder Portland's family had been killed in their sleep, and the muggle authorities had chalked it up to an attempted break-in. Ryder's disappearance got a lot less focus than it should have, but still enough to get some information about him. Ryder had been quiet, hadn't made friends easily, had avoided people. He had turned eleven a few weeks before disappearing. There were several pictures of him that Poppy saved for future reference.

We found an interview with Ryder's older brother, Jarred, who had been away at university when his parents and two younger sisters had been murdered, and his brother had disappeared. Jarred also said that his brother had been a little odd, sometimes, but a normal kid. Apparently, he'd been bullied by some of the other boys at his primary school for being weird. Jarred brushed over it in favor of talking about the tragedy, but he did claim that "there are perfectly normal explanations for all the weird things those little pricks made fun of Ryder for."

That was a very small part of the interview, but after Poppy read that, she paused to frown at us. "It sounds like he might've been a wizard."

Albus's eyes widened. "Do you think it's a coincidence?"

"I'm not sure I believe in coincidences anymore," Poppy said.

That opened up the question of if other children who had disappeared weren't actually muggles. We breezed back through a couple of articles about other kids, and started to notice that the obligatory descriptions of the families and children all had a couple of similarities. The families were all nice, or respectable, or lovely people, but "just a little closed off from people, if you know what I mean." The children were all independent or not quite all there or even outright weird. All things that'd we'd overlooked before, but now seemed like clues. Stillens wasn't just collecting children. He was collecting muggleborn witches and wizards.

The question that we couldn't figure out was why?

At around two in the morning, Poppy stumbled across an obscure muggle conspiracy theory blog that had documented all three children who had been erased from existence. Yes, it did attribute the disappearances to alien abduction, but it had scrounged up mountains of information that we never would have been able to find.

Emma Chaudhary had been a four-year-old from London who had been entirely erased from existence last July. The theorist had found her birth certificate by looking through thousands of hospital records from the area (probably illegal). Her parents' names matched the young couple who had been murdered and had a room set up for a small child in their flat but no evidence of ever having or trying to have a child. There were empty photo frames, for goodness sakes. He also eventually managed to track down a local mum who said she vaguely remembered seeing Mrs. Chaudhary dropping a little girl off at a preschool, even if every staff member at that particular preschool swore up and down that they'd never seen Mrs. Chaudhary or a girl named Emma. It was clearly aliens, and there was no other explanation.