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ღ chapter eighteen ( the whomping willow )
JULES WAITED FOR Ron, and the two of them left for the Gryffindor common room, where they could peacefully wait for Harry. She didn't know the password, so she needed him to get in. They found Hermione inside, her face a pale white. "Buckbeak lost."
She felt lost, her head swimming, as Hermione showed them the note. "They can't!"
"Professor Trelawney," Harry panted. bursting in at that moment. "Just told me-"
But he stopped abruptly at the sight of their faces.
"Buckbeak lost," Ron said weakly. "Hagrid's just sent this." Hagrid's note was dry this time, no tears had splattered it, yet his hand seemed to have shaken so much as he wrote that it was hardly legible.
Lost appeal. They're going to execute at sunset. Nothing you can do. Don't come down. I don't want you to see it. - Hagrid
"We've got to go," Harry said at once. "He can't just sit there on his own, waiting for the executioner!"
"Sunset, though," Ron sighed, staring out the window in a glazed sort of way. "We'd never be allowed... 'specially you, Harry, and Jules."
Harry sank his head into his hands, thinking. "If we only had the Invisibility Cloak-"
"Where is it?" Hermione said. Harry told her about leaving it in the passageway under the one-eyed witch, Jules curiously listening since she hadn't heard about it before.
"...if Snape sees me anywhere near there again, I'm in serious trouble," he finished.
"That's true," Hermione said, getting to her feet. "If he sees you... How do you open the witch's hump again?"
"You tap it and say, 'Dissendium,'" Harry answered. "But-"
Hermione didn't wait for the rest of his sentence; she strode across the room, pushed open the Fat Lady's portrait and vanished from sight. "She hasn't gone to get it?" Ron said, staring after her.
She had. Hermione returned a quarter of an hour later with the silvery cloak folded carefully under her robes. "Hermione, I don't know what's gotten, into you lately!" Ron said, astounded. "First you hit Malfoy, then you walk out on Professor Trelawney-"
Hermione looked rather flattered. They went down to dinner with everybody else, but did not return to their common rooms afterward. They skulked in an empty chamber off the entrance hall, listening, until they were sure it was deserted. They heard a last pair of people hurrying across the hall and a door slamming. Hermione poked her head around the door.
