Slytherin Princess | ✓

twenty-six

"So you want me to talk to a beetle?" I whispered suspiciously.

"Not any beetle, Lady, it's Rita Skeeter," Draco beamed, dragging me to the courtyard. "We give her the quotes we need and then she flies away!"

"And how do you know what she needs?"

"She sends me an owl with questions and the meeting place," said Draco. "I've already told her my information from the Yule Ball."

"So that's why you've had more owls than usual! I just thought Narcissa stopped sending me letters," I huffed walking to a solitary birch tree. "Talking about your mother, have you told her about you and Pansy?"

"Me and Pansy?" he echoed, scrunching up his nose like he had eaten something sour.

"Isn't she your girlfriend?" I raised a brow at him.

"Nevermind that," he answered quickly. "Skeeter is on the branch and these are the questions she wants you to answer."

Draco handed me a rolled parchment with three questions:

- Three words you'd use to describe Hermione Granger.

- What do you think about her relationships with Harry Potter and Viktor Krum?

- What is your friendship status with Hermione Granger and Harry Potter?

Looking up from the parchment, I look to see a brown little beetle with rectangular marks around the insect's eyes. I put my hand out and it flew into it.

"Well, three words I'd use to describe Granger are... ambitious— er— studious and... er—"

"Plain!" Pansy sniggered, cutting me off.

"I suppose," I mumbled into my hand where Rita Skeeter the beetle sat. "Oh, Granger's relationship with Krum is quite weird to be honest. He took her to the Yule Ball and then the whole second task situation— I thought she was with Harry, but their other friend likes— I mean, no, nevermind that. It's just weird, she hops from one to the other —"

"Almost as if she gave them Love Potions," Pansy gasped, butting in once more. I shot her a dirty look, instantly shutting her comment down.

"She's quite brainy, so she very well could have made a Love Potion, but they're banned at Hogwarts," I commented.

Draco sniggered at my comment and I rolled my eyes, ignoring him. Talking to the beetle was very odd and I felt like I was being judged for talking into my hand. The last time Skeeter needed a statement from me, she just asked— in person, like a human.

"And lastly, you need my relationship with Granger and Harry? There is none. Granger is a muggleborn Gryffindor and I am a pureblood Slytherin, that's it. I'm acquainted with Harry Potter, but nothing more as he is also a Gryffindor. That is all."

At my final comment, I pulled my hand away from my mouth and watched the beetle fly away. Honestly, I hope this woman doesn't create another nasty article as she had done for Hagrid and actually uses all of my words.

Almost three days later, Pansy came running out of the Slytherin common room as Draco and I made it to our Double Potions lesson.

"Adelaide Faye Ward, just wait until you see this," she squealed holding the newest addition of Witch Weekly.

Draco looked over my shoulder as opened up to the page Pansy had marked. A colored photograph of Harry headed a short piece entitled: Harry Potter's Secret Heartache.

Oh no. It read:

A boy like no other, perhaps— yet a boy suffering all the usual pangs of adolescence, writes Rita Skeeter. Deprived of love since the tragic demise of his parents, fourteen-year-old Harry Potter thought he had found solace in his steady girlfriend at Hogwarts, Muggleborn Hermione Granger. Little did he know that he would shortly be suffering yet another emotional blow in a life already littered with personal loss.