Funny, I never quite pegged myself as the kind of person to be breaking into a dingy, run-down bar in the dead of night. But then again, after joining the Death Eaters, changing my mind, faking my own death, getting hired by the Grim Reaper, and escaping from the land of the dead with Sirius Black in tow, nothing should surprise me much anymore.

The sign on the door of the Hog’s Head quite clearly reads ‘closed’ (actually, it says ‘cloasd’�”spelling never was one of Aberforth Dumbledore’s stronger suits), but that doesn’t deter me. The door’s locked, but that doesn’t, either.

I reach into my pocket for my wand, fumbling clumsily with my bandaged hands. I’ve taken to bandaging my hands lately for the simple reason that people tend to die when I snap my fingers. It all has to do with the whole having-been-an-apprentice-for-the-Grim-Reaper thing, but that’s another story. Namely, a story called “Oh No, Nott Again” by Schmerg_The_Impaler, who certainly likes her name related puns.

But I digress. There’s another reason, too, why my hands are bandaged, and that’s simply because I don’t want to leave fingerprints. Not many people are in on the secret that I’m still alive. There’s my best friend, November Gibbs, there’s Sirius Black, there’s a few select members of the Order of the Phoenix, and then, there’s Mr. Mortimer Deathly, the Grim Reaper himself, though he prefers to call himself the Minister of Death.

But apparently, Aberforth Dumbledore knows that I’m not as dead as I pretend to be, or else he wouldn’t have sent me a letter this morning. I give the note he another glance in the dim glow of wand light, trying to make out exactly what incantation he wanted me to use.

Theador Not,
Com too Hogs Hed Thurs 10 at nite after cloasing. Youse this spell Unenkumbrus. I nede too speke with you yes I no your alive no nede to pretend. Onestly you wer never all that suttel about it. This is very importent so if you dont com you wil end up regreting it.
--Aberforth Dumbledore
P.S. Dont go around tocking about this its confedenshal. Beleiv me I will find out and you can bet I wont be hapy is that clere boy.

Aberforth’s spelling may be abysmal, but at least it’s usually phonetically correct. Probably the spell he gave me isn’t TOO grievously mangled. “Unencumbris?” I murmur, directing my wand toward the door.

At first, nothing seems to happen, but when I push on the door, it swings open as smoothly as the trapdoor of a gallows.
The first thing I notice is the dark. Okay, after the strong smell of goats subsides, the first thing I notice is the dark. It’s eerie, really, and I’ve been to Mr. Deathly’s all-black office. (Have you ever tried to really examine the wording of a contract that’s written on black paper with black ink? It isn’t easy.) I’m not exactly a regular at the Hog’s Head, but I’ve never seen a bar that didn’t have at least one solitary, optimistic light somewhere in the place. Aberforth lives in a flat above the bar as far as I’ve heard, and I don’t seem to remember him having any night-vision superpowers.

As I stumble through the ridiculously dark room, the floor creaks like Voldemort’s joints. My wand casts eerie shadows on the walls�”one of them looks a bit like Snape�”and I’m beginning to feel not-so-comfortable. Why is it that I, who plainly fits none of the Gryffindor criteria keeps ending up in these dangerous situations?

My wand illuminates a crack in the wall at the back of the bar. It seems to be a door leading upstage, pulled just sliiightly open. On closer inspection, the stairway is very, very, very narrow but makes up for it by being extremely creaky, rank-smelling, and cobwebby. It’s really weird how silent it is in here�”my footsteps are thunderously loud on the stairs, and Aberforth hasn’t once yelled at me to ‘keep down the racket, boy, you’ll rile up the goats again.’

When I reach the top of the stairs, I’m rather surprised that there’s only one tiny room, more of an attic than anything else. I would have thought that the brother of the bright-and-shiny Albus Dumbledore would live in more comfort.

No sign of Aberforth up here, either. It’s as silent as the grave, only not a grave inhabited by, say, a vampire, because those can get fairly raucous from time to time, especially late at night. (Growing up near a wizarding cemetery does things to your personality. I distinctly remember sharing this joke with an irritable vampire when I was about eight: “How do you catch a vampire? Have a stake out.” He was not amused, but I thought it was a bloody good joke. Heh. Bloody. Get it?)

Erm… anyway… my detour down memory lane is promptly ended as my eyes adjust to the darkness and take in the strangeness of the room around me. There are flowers everywhere�”on the tables, the floor, huge pots of flowers on every available surface. They look pretty commonplace at first, just plain white flowers about the size of my fist, but after a good look with a decent Lumos, it becomes quite clear that these are not your garden-variety flowers. (Heh. Garden-variety. Get it?

They’re a strange white, a little too bright, whiter than snow. They’re slightly translucent, and practically glow in the dark, whiter than Draco Malfoy on the rare occasion that he and his precious skin dare to venture outside. And each flower is exactly the same, like they’re all cut from the same stencil. It’s odd, I’m here in a dark, deserted, silent bar full of spiderwebs and who knows what else, and for some reason, the scariest thing here is a bunch of flowers.

I’ve never really liked flowers. One of my earliest memories is my mum’s funeral. (Don’t expect anything sentimental; I don’t remember my mother, and I’ve never angsted about that�”that’s what I don’t understandabout Potter. How can he miss something he doesn’t even remember?) Anyway, at the funeral, there were flowers everywhere, just crowding the place, and everyone kept bringing more in. I felt like it was me who was getting buried instead of my mum. Everyone still assumes that when I started crying, it was for my mother. Nobody believes that I just didn’t like the flowers, or that I can even remember anything that far back.

So in my mind, there’s always been a pretty distinct correlation between flowers and death. And despite what you or Mr. Deathly might think, I’m really not all that fond of death.

I take a tentative step in the dark, trying to put my foot somewhere where there are no creepy soul-sucking flowers, and end up planting it right on the edge of a very small, low table that I’d managed to miss earlier. What happens next is a scene straight from a slapstick pantomime. The table flips over, I fall flat on my face (popping two or three spots in the process), the flower pot flies about five feet in the air, lands on my head, and shatters against the ground. Oh, very smooth. Classic Theo Nott.

As I scramble to my feet, my wand illuminates something that causes me to fall down again.

It is Aberforth Dumbledore’s face.

When my heart begins beating normally again, I let out a nervous laugh. “Oh. Erm, uh, Aber… that is, Mr. Dumbledore! Erm, sorry about your flowers, er, I’ll try to clean that up. I didn’t hear you come in.”

And that’s when I realize exactly why I didn’t hear him. It’s because he’s not breathing.

I am alone in a very dark room with a dead man.

* * * * * *

Naturally, I do what any sensible man would and run around in circles screaming and knocking over flowerpots. (What, I said ‘sensible,’ not ‘courageous.’ This is Slytherin Sensible we’re talking here.)

The first thought that comes to my mind (well, after ‘OH SWEET MERLIN, DEAD GUY, DEAD GUY, DEAD GUY’) is, “Oh dear. I didn’t happen to snap my fingers, did I?”

After a cursory examination of my (very, very, very shaky) hands, I come to the conclusion that they’re still securely bandaged. So this isn’t me, then… or at least… not directly. Because the truth is, Aberforth knew I was still alive, and he wanted me to come to the Hog’s Head to tell me an extremely important secret. Someone else found out the secret. That someone didn’t want me to find it out. I smell a rat, and that rat is Mr. Deathly scented.

I realize dreamily that during the thought process of the last paragraph, I’ve managed to race down the stairs, out of the Hogs’ Head, and am standing in the middle of a dark Hogsmeade back alleyway, clutching a broken pot of creepy-looking flowers. Funny the things that your body can automatically do when you’re scared out of your wits.

I have no idea what I’m doing. But maybe the flowers are the place to start. I don’t know what they mean, but they have to be important somehow. And I do know only one person who (a. Knows that I am nowhere near as deceased as Aberforth, and (b. Knows nearly everything about plants. Her name is Eglantine Mackle, she is an expert Herbologist and Order of the Phoenix member, she works nearby, she has a reputation for being extremely eccentric, and… she lives surrounded by countless extraordinarily dangerous carnivorous plants.

Oh joy. This is going to be a bumpy ride.


* * * * * *
They call Eglantine Mackle the Crazy Plant Lady, despite the fact that she can’t be more than two years older than I am. But she does seem much, much older�”in appearance, in bearing, in matter of speech, in mannerisms, and in terrifying-my-pants off intimidation factor. She lives in a dilapidated little house half-hidden behind a massive, state-of-the-art greenhouse, full of the deadliest, most unusual, most enormous plants known to wizardkind. Did I mention that she specializes in man-eating plants?

The journey to Eglantine Mackle’s is unexpectedly long, given that she only lives a few blocks away from the Hog’s Head, but when you take into account that I have to be very careful that no one sees me, it’s a bit more understandable. What will all of the ducking into alleyways, cloaking myself in midnight and flattening myself against walls whenever anyone passes, it makes me feel like some kind of inept cat burglar.

The faint glow of those eerie white flowers I’m carrying doesn’t help the whole ‘trying to be inconspicuous’ thing, so I’ve wrapped the flowerpot in my cloak. That means my poor scrawny little body is freezing cold, which means I’m shivering, which means it’s getting more and more probably that I’ll drop the pot with a deafening ‘smash.’

But, miraculously, I don’t. I tiptoe through the outer door of the Mackle Exotic Nursery (which sounds to me like some sort of naughty burlesque featuring underage performers) without even letting the bell on the door let out a single muffled jingle.

Of course, Eglantine immediately negates that by barking “Nott!”

I wince. It’s like being in Professor McGonagall’s class again. “Can you please keep your voice down?” I say very, very quietly and not as calmly as I would have liked.

“Why?” says Eglantine solidly, her expression not changing a bit.

“Because I’m not dead,” I explain simply.

Eglantine’s face is still impassive. “I think I’d be talking rather louder if a dead person just walked in,” she says. “Like, screaming at the top of my lungs.”

I can’t imagine Eglantine frightened enough of anything to scream�”the woman lives among killer plants, for the love of Merlin�”but I’m sure that if she did scream, it would shatter all of the glass in the greenhouse.

“Look,” I explain, trying to sound patient. “Nobody knows I’m alive except for the Order of the Phoenix and… well, er, a few select other… beings.” A plant shaped like a deformed lawn mower at my feet purrs menacingly, and I shift my balance in an ungainly sort of jig. “I’m not exactly eager for the rest of the world to know.”

Eglantine shrugs. “Nobody told me that,” she says, pulling a massive steak out of her pocket and flinging it at the lawnmower plant, which devours it in one gulp and is immediately placated.

Eglantine is… is a sight You do not often see a woman who looks like her. She’s probably about six-foot-one and is built like an Erumpet. I wouldn’t call her fat�”mainly because I’d be afraid she’d beat me up if I did�”but she has uncommonly broad shoulders and a solid, powerful torso that could be used as a battering ram. She has a complexion as dark as potting soil and strong, decisive features, not beautiful by any stretch, but as imperious as any queen. Her tightly curly frizz of black hair is pulled back into a chaotic ponytail, and she wears a pair of shredded overalls that look as though she lost a fight with a Chimaera in them and an ominously stained old cloak. She wears a pair of thick-rimmed glasses low on her nose, and the way she’s staring at me, it’s like I’m an ant and their lenses are two magnifying glasses focused on me. If I’d had feelers, her eyes would have burned them off minutes ago.

“Is there a specific reason why you’re here, Nott?” Eglantine asks in her peculiar voice, brisk and clipped to excess but still commanding and almost unfemininely deep. “Or do you simply want to impose your company on me?

Charming young woman. I clear my throat. “Well, er, actually, I had a bit of a, er, question about this… plant thing.” I set the flowerpot on the table and whip the cloak off with a flourish.

Eglantine blinks slightly.

I don’t know what I was expecting. The lady’s seen every freakish plant in the world. But a part of me can’t help but feel that these flowers are somehow deeply sinister, somehow involved with Mr. Deathly and his sordid little schemes.

“Exactly what would you like to ask?” says Eglantine, turning up the intensity of her eyes.

“Well, first of all, I’d like to know what it is,” I say in my mildest voice.

“Aspweed,” Eglantine replies promptly and a little more matter-of-factly than I would have preferred.

Well, a name didn’t exactly help me much, except that I now know for sure that it isn’t an Audrey Two. “Does it, you know, typically… eat people?” I ask carefully, not wanting to offend a person who breeds carnivorous plants for a living.

She lets out a bit of a snort, but doesn’t exactly look like she wants to sic and plants on me, which is at least rather comforting. “If it was a maneating plant you’d brought here,” she says, “Then it would have eaten you before you even made it through the door. Aspweed isn’t the sort of plant I usually deal with, but I’ve taken a bit of an interest in it lately. It’s fascinating, really- it’s more alike an animal than a plan.” Before I can even ask her what she means by that, she pets one of the creepy white flowers lightly with a finger and explains, “It’s perfectly harmless when it’s dead, but if it’s alive, it’s deadly.”

* * * * * *

Great. Just great. If I die because of this plant, the first thing I plan on doing when I get to heaven is beating up Aberforth.

Eglantine seems to sense my shock, because she gives me a gentle smile. I almost fall over, not because of the whole ‘deadly plant’ thing, but because this woman, this… thing is smiling at me. It’s like running into a humongous tiger and having it do nothing more than purr and bat around a ball of string.

“Oh, one Aspweed alone isn’t dangerous at all,” she assures me. “But they breathe… poison into the air, in very small amounts, of course. If you have a lot of them in one place, the poison paralyzes your muscles and slowly eats away at your brain until you are. Not a pleasant way to go.” She holds up a little jar of glowing, pearly-white goop. “This is pure Aspweed poison, right here. I’m using it to bottle-feed some of the seedlings.”

“Get that jar of death away from me,” I mutter, probably turning about the same colour as the neon white Aspweed blossoms.

Eglantine laughs, not a friendly laugh. The tiger is angry again. “Oh, please,” she says. “You’d need to be exposed to, what, twenty of the plants at least an hour for it to even make you ill, unless I gave you a direct shot of the poison straight to the vein. People even use it for seasoning-- I hear they’re putting the flowers in cocktails or something stupid like that. Aberforth Dumbledore ordered a boatload from me just the other day.”

“Oh, Godric,” I mumble.

Eglantine’s eyes intensify again. “What?” she says sharply.

“Well,” I sigh, “I hate to break it to you, but Aberforth Dumbledore is dead right now, and there were about a million of these plants lying around.”

Eglantine’s face grows as hard and impassive as stone. It looks like if I tapped her on the cheek with my pinkie finger, her whole head would shatter into little bits. For a minute, she looks as dead as Aberforth, but just when I’m ready to start freaking out again, she says in a flat voice, “No disrespect for the dead, but I never suspected that even he could be so stupid. I know he knew better than to put them all in the same room… and why would he stay in there with them? There is absolutely no way he didn’t know that.”

It’s almost embarrassing to hear her sounding… unsure. “I… well, I don’t think it was Aberforth who ordered the flowers,” I say, keeping a safe distance.

“What?”

I wet my lips with my tongue, hoping that no bodily harm came to me. “Can I, er, see the order he filled out, at least?”

“Sure, whatever,” Eglantine says with a heavy dose of disbelief, and she bustles over to the most terrifying, spiky-looking plant you can imagine. She gives its spiny pod a gentle stroke, and the pod pops open immediately to reveal a stack of paper. “I store my records in here to keep them secret,” Eglantine explains. “If it were anyone else who did that, he’d get his arm bitten off. So don’t go trying anything.”

Yeah. As if I’d ever stick my hand into the mouth of something that looks a lot like a floral crocodile.

Eglantine hands me a sheet of slightly damp paper with Aberforth’s name and address written across the top. It looks like Aberforth’s handwriting, but then, so do most messy, illegible scrawls.

Then I look at the message.

“Twenty-five Aspweed plants delivered directly, as soon as possible. �“A.M.L.T.D.”

“Egl… Ms. Mackle, there’s no way Aberforth sent this.”

Eglantine’s brow creased. “What do you mean?”

“Well, for one, everything’s spelled right.” I let out a nervous laugh. “Anyone who knows anything knows that Aberforth could never spell to save his life.” Ooh. Maybe not the best wording when discussing the departed.

The crazy plant lady looks momentarily flustered. “I know plants,” she says, beginning to pace back and forth, “not people. And I would bet you anything that I know a lot more about plants than you know about people.”

She has a point. I decide to keep my mouth shut and watch her pace for a few minutes, reading and rereading the order and rummaging around for various assorted papers. At last, I say, “Well, did Aberforth give you the order in person, or did he mail it over?”

“No, he sent his delivery boy over with the note. I gave him the Aspweeds and he took them over straightaway. This was… last night, I think?” Eglantine’s eyes go squinty behind her glasses. It’s odd, I feel like I’m the dominant one in this conversation all of a sudden. I would be relishing it if I weren’t so panicky.

“Do you remember what the delivery boy looked like?”

Eglantine’s eyes go even squintier, not a great sign. “I have to say, I cannot remember,” she replies slowly. “I couldn’t see his face. He was tall, I know that for sure. Tall, and he had a soft voice.”

Well, at least it wasn’t Mr. Deathly himself. He’s small enough to represent the Lollipop Guild, and if it had been him, Eglantine would not be having trouble remembering what he looked like. There is something not quite right about Mr. Deathly’s appearance that people don’t soon forget. “Was he taller than you?” I ask, trying to picture who it could be.

“I…” Eglantine paused and calculated a spot in the air with her eyes. “I’m not sure. I was sitting down. He was probably about your height. Maybe a bit taller. No, he might have been shorter, I’m sure he can’t have been taller than the Omnivorous Oak sapling, and you’re almost the same height…”

She pauses in mid-sentence. “I’m notifying the Aurors at once,” she announces, regaining her regal assurance.

“BAD idea,” I splutter, almost falling over. “Aberforth’s flat is full of my fingerprints. And you know that any security spells would come back saying that I was the last person in there… and seeing as I’m supposed to be dead, well, that wouldn’t go over so well.”

“Well, what do you suggest I do?” Eglantine snaps, glaring at me harder than ever. She gets to her feet, and she looks even taller than I remembered. “I think it’s best you go now, Nott. I have enough problems of my own. In case you didn’t realize, this is not going to be good for my business.”

I open my mouth to protest, then realize that not only will that be futile, but that I don’t really want to be here anyway. I don’t know what I want to do, but I’m sure that it doesn’t involve being glared at by Eglantine Mackle and her myriad dangerous pet plants. I crack the door open and squeeze myself out, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible, should anyone be looking. But as soon as I reach the pavement, I lose my footing on something slippery and fall down on my backside in a really debonair sort of way.

I mutter something not-so-nice under my breath as I scramble back up to my feet, hoping nobody spotted me… and then I realize.

What I slipped in is not your everyday puddle or Krup dung or what have you. It’s a pearly, glowing white goo, the exact bright white of Aspweed blossoms, and I know at once what it is. It’s pure, undiluted Aspweed poison. And it’s… not just a single blob on the ground either. Illuminated in the weak moonlight is a faint but unmistakable trail, leading up to a small building across the street.

What do you expect me to do? I follow it. And immediately wish I hadn’t.

* * * * * *

There’s a reason why I’ve never been in Quincy Smugg’s Gourmet Butcher Shop before. There’s also a reason why it’s directly across from Eglantine’s greenhouse. I’ve always had no qualms about eating tasty dead animals, but I draw the line at more… interesting species like dragons, hippogriffs, and sautéed giant flesh-eating slugs (which are apparently a delicacy at Beauxbatons).

I’m fairly certain that most of wizarding Britain’s a bit hesitant to eat the sorts of things that Smugg’s sells, which is probably why Eglantine’s by far his best customer. Some of her plants are quite picky.

“Oh, hello, I was just about to close up shop!” exclaims Quincy Smugg the second I step into the shop, rubbing his hands together and looking eager at the prospect of a new customer for once. “What can I do for you?”

Smugg’s a cheerful guy, but I can’t say I feel all too comfortable around him. Maybe it’s the liver-spotted grayish skin and the long stringy white hair falling past his shoulders in a ring around a shiny bald spot. Maybe it’s the incredibly crooked yellow teeth with little bits of discoloured bits of meat wedged between them. Or maybe it’s the apron that doesn’t quite have all of the bloodstains washed out, or the huge meat cleaver he’s wielding.

“I’d like your name, if that’s okay with you,” adds Smugg, leaning forward over the counter and directly into a platter of spiny-looking fish.

The hood of my cloak is pulled up over my head to keep out the cold and keep in my identity, but I still can’t be too careful. Without even thinking about what sort of alias I plan to give, my mouth answers for me.

“I’m January Gibbs, sir,” a strange voice answers. Ugh, how did that hoarse sort of treble come out of my mouth? Why on earth did I give the name of my best friend November Gibbs’ great-aunt? And what on earth possessed me to decide to play a girl? I accepted long ago that I just wasn’t meant to be a very good-looking bloke. I would make a sinfully hideous girl.

Mr. Smugg peers nearsightedly at me, and I hurriedly hide my chin in my cloak to conceal the sparse, bristly hairs I’ve been trying to cultivate there.

“You know, I went to school with a January Gibbs,” Mr. Smugg says thoughtfully, scratching the wart on his chin. “Lovely girl. Vegetarian. She used to hex me whenever she saw me.”

“She’s my great-aunt,” I add hastily, though given the weird scratchy voice I’m using, I sound more like someone’s great-aunt than anything else. “I’m named for her.”

Smugg nods and absentmindedly chops up something bright orange and fuzzy that oozes pale teal blood. “How is the old girl?” he asks. “Tell her that Quincy still hasn’t given up on his Jannie, will you? I heard her husband died a couple of years back… something about a giant squid…”

I let him ramble on for a couple of minutes about how he’d give anything in the world to hunt down that giant squid and finish it off once and for all, but when it looked like he was getting a shade too ‘Captain Ahab,’ I interrupted, “Er, I was just wondering if you’ve seen my… boyfriend?”

Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m fairly certain that’s the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever said.

“What?” Smugg is trying carefully not to look taken aback that January Gibbs II has a boyfriend. Very little of my face is visible from under my hood, but what with the pimply nose sticking out, the stringy build, the hair on my knuckles, and the voice reminiscent of a dying female moose, it’s painfully clear that I am lacking in feminine beauty.

“My boyfriend? You haven’t had anyone in here lately?” I repeat. “Because… er… he said that he was going to pick up some, er, meat and then come by my house, and he never showed up.”

Smugg’s wearing his sympathetic face now. I can tell he thinks I got stood up. “Well, what does he look like?” he asks patiently.

Dang, dang, dang. “Errrrrrrrrrm... he’s really hard to describe,” I say lamely. “Er, he’s tall, not really tall, about my height I guess... maybe a little taller. Or a little bit shorter. He’s, he’s, er, he’s got a soft voice.”

Smugg is squinting at me. “The only person who’s come in here the last couple days is Eglantine Mackle,” he says. “Wonderful, wonderful woman, don’t you think? She’s done more for carnivorous plants than the rest of London put together!”

I’m not entirely sure that’s an accomplishment. In my opinion, the only thing that should be ‘done for’ carnivorous plants is spraying them with toxic chemicals and chopping them into tiny bits. But I nod and smile and say, “You’re sure that sometime... just a few hours ago... there wasn’t a boy who came in? Are you sure you remember? This is pretty important.”

“No, no, I’m quite sure. Business isn’t exactly booming.”

Urgh. “Well... thanks anyway,” I say, heading toward the door. Super, my one clue was a dead end, and now I don’t have a single lead. Why can’t real life be like those murder mysteries where there’s the neat little procession of handy clues that all point directly to the next one?

“Sure you don’t want to take anything with you while you’re at it?” Smugg calls. “Some spiny blowfish, or maybe a sliver of porlock? We’ve got centaur shank fresh in!”

“I think I’ll pass, thanks,” I say, heading toward the door.

But something stops me in my path. I see a dark figure heading his way toward the butcher shop, as improbable as this sounds. A dark figure that I know all too well. Even in shadow, that slightly stopped posture and outrageously prominent nose is unmistakable.

My disguise is not all that convincing�”I’m not even sure that Smugg is completely falling for it�”and I know for a fact that the man who has been my teacher and head of House since the age of eleven will recognize me. Especially since he’s extremely clever, skilled in Legilimency, and all that.

I look around frantically for something to hide behind that ISN’T a taxidermied Yeti. “Mr. Smugg,” I exclaim, forgetting to use my ‘girl voice’ altogether and lapsing back into an unmistakeable baritone, “Can I... use your cellar?”

“Why?” he asks calmly, apparently not even noticing my freakish voice.

I look behind my shoulder. Snape’s advancing. “Because... that’s my boyfriend’s dad,” I blurt. “And, er, he hates me. And he doesn’t know we’re still going out.”

Smugg winks. “Oho, I know how that is. Young forbidden love...” I’m finding it rather hard to believe that Smugg does know how it is. From the sounds of it, he was madly in love with November’s great-aunt, who found him disgusting and offensive. But it’s not like my love life’s been any better, so I guess I can’t talk.

“So... cellar?”

Smugg shakes his head. “Go ahead, sweet pea, but I’m not sure you’ll like it down there. Got to have a strong stomach... don’t have any pets, do you?”

Ulp. But if I’m choosing between seeing bloody carcasses and BEING a bloody carcass, I’ll choose seeing, thanks. I pull the door to the cellar open and slam it shut just as Snape is stepping inside the butcher shop.

Huddled in the dark, dusty stairway and breathing heavily with my heart pounding somewhere in the region of my throat, I hear a low, nasal voice say, “Strange, I could have sworn there was someone else in here.”

“No, no, not at all,” Smugg’s old wheezy voice replies. “You must’ve been looking at my taxidermied yeti. Beautiful specimen, isn’t she? I call her Flossie.”

“Indeed.” There is a faint pause. “Three mermaid tails, please, with the scales scraped off.”

Smugg lets out a giddy laugh, apparently thrilled to be getting actual business at last. “Unusual request, sir.”

“Necessary for unusual potions. You seem to be the only... legitimate vendor in England, unless I wished to obtain them my self from the Hogwarts lake.”

Could the ‘delivery boy’ Eglantine mentioned be Snape? He knows everything there is to know about poisons�”and his voice certainly is soft. Just hearing him talk, I can’t help but remember when I was in his class and the room was quiet enough to hear a needle drop in a haystack, everyone straining to make out every word Snape said. And then there’s the obvious�”the man killed Dumbledore. Who’s to say he didn’t want to finish the job off and do the other Mr. Dumbledore in while he was at it?

But Eglantine said that the delivery boy was tall, about my height. Snape is not a big guy. He really only comes up to about my chin, and it’s not like I’m a giant or anything…

As I listen to the conversation between Snape and the terribly excited Mr. Smugg, I begin to realize with growing discomfort that the wall I’m leaning against is… sticky. When I first slammed the door to the cellar, I couldn’t see anything but, well, nothing, but now I can make out dim outline, and I can’t say I like what I see.

Dangling from the ceiling around the room are the sinister shapes of various dead animals. I don’t want to know specifically which ones they are. I prefer my lunch without identifiable body parts.

But it’s not the hanging carcasses that really spoil my appetite. It’s the fact that… when I examine my hands, the bandages wrapped around them are damp with congealing blood. And I know nothing’s wrong with the hands underneath those bandages.

Beginning to feel very revolted, I back away from the wall and whisper “Lumos.” My wand is lightly smeared with blood where I’m holding it, but the blood on my hands and the wand I’m holding is nothing compared to the wall.

You know those horrible modern art museums, where they display the most idiotic things as Great Art and insinuate that you’re a total philistine if you don’t see any, I don’t know, splendid beauty in a rusty old soup can or an ink blot or a dollop of dog poop? Yeah, I went to a lot of those when I was younger. It was my ‘edgy intellectual’ phase, that phase when I decided that I would try and make up for my lack of friends by becoming a Master of Counterculture.

Anyway, I was obsessed with those paintings where the artist would just grab a bucket of paint and splatter it all over a canvas and go, “there, done, that’s art,” and sell it for millions of Galleons.

Well, this wall looks exactly like one of those. Done in bright red.

This is right about when I start to realize that something is very, very wrong.

Let’s see… my decision is… remain trapped in a cellar decorated in a tasteful ‘blood and gore’ colour scheme… or run back upstairs into the clutches of the psycho Mr. Smugg who’s been doing who knows what down here. Stay down here, disgusting as the notion is, seems the safer option… until Mr. Smugg comes back downstairs.

This is mind-warpingly strange. Butchers deal with a lot of the less desirable bits of an animal, but I’m positive that nothing under that job description involves splashing blood all over the walls and the floor. And lying on the ground is a huge frozen dragon steak, covered in bright red blood.

Dragon blood is green. What kind of a sick person would use a dragon steak as a murder weapon?

There has to be a cellar door, some sort of quick easy way out that doesn’t involve facing Mr. Smugg. I thought he bought that January Gibbs story too quickly, and I should expected something was up when he claimed that nobody came into the butcher shop except for Eglantine. All cellars have doors, don’t they? I shine my wand around the room, but it’s still too dark to make out any cracks in the wall that could turn out to be an escape route. There’s only one thing left to do, and it is not something I would have chosen to do in any other circumstance. I feel my way around the room, the bloody, horrible room with animal carcasses on the walls.

Next time someone questions my masculinity, I’ll be ready for them.

Eventually, my finger strikes the edge of… a small but unmistakable crack in the wall. I slide my hand down until I feel… yes, a handle. Thank God, thank Merlin, thank whoever built this cellar. I pull it open, and immediately feel as though someone swiftly encased me in a giant block of ice. Oh, great. Oh, wonderful. This isn’t an escape route to the less bloody and disgusting outside world. It’s some kind of highly refrigerated meat locker, packed with even more gory specimens. Oh, just perfect indeed. I’m just about to slam the meat locker shut and contemplate my grisly fate when I notice something.

The trail of blood leading from the wall is no longer just a steady trickle. Massive amounts of blood pool around my feet, beginning to freeze into bloodsicles in the cold of the meat locker. And lying in shadow in the corner of the meat locker is a motionless figure, blood still oozing from its forehead.

For some reason, I can’t look away from the pair of shattered glasses next to the body. Somehow, it’s the most sinister part of the whole scene.

During my stint working under Mr. Deathly, I learned a thing or two about death. For example, dead people usually don’t stir and blink dazedly when you let out a strangled-sounding gasp and trip over them. And yet, Eglantine Mackle does just that, something that I am unprepared for in my line of training.

I’ve long considered myself a realist, though lately with all the weird turns my life has been taking lately, I may be becoming more of a surrealist. But I’m not the sort of person who would stand over a hopelessly mangled corpse sobbing that it can’t be dead, it’s not dead, there has to be a way we can solve it. So needless to say, I’m rather taken aback when the more gruesome sight I’ve ever seen turns out to be alive after all.

I guess this just proves that Eglantine is invincible.

“Go away,” she mumbles, a trickle of blood running down from her mouth and joining its fellows in the puddle on the floor. “’M trying to sleep. Get out, it’s freezing.”

I gape. “Egl… Ms. Mackle, we need to get out of here. Now.” My teeth are chattering like prepubescent schoolgirls, and the hairs on my arms are standing up straight. If the grievous bodily harm and severe blood loss doesn’t finish her off, the cold certainly will.

“Five more minutes,” mutters Eglantine, rolling over directly into her shed blood.

“Look, are you… are you all right?” I ask. My footprints and fingerprints are already the last in Aberforth Dumbledore’s house, and they’re the last in Ms. Mackle’s greenhouse as well. If she ends up dying on me, it won’t reflect too well on my reputation.

“I guess I have a headache, but it’s nothing that bad,” she mumbles sleepily. “Just leave me alone. Who are you anyway?”

“Theo? Theodore Nott?” I reply. “I came into your greenhouse earlier today with an Aspweed plant?”

Eglantine says nothing. She’s lapsed back into unconsciousness.

I don’t like taking matters into my own hands, I really don’t. But I seem to have been doing that a lot lately. With unwonted Herculean strength, I somehow manage to grasp Eglantine under the armpits�”her clothing has frozen stiff, I notice�”and drag her back out of the meat locker into the cellar. The sudden warmth is almost as jarring as the first blast of cold air when I stepped into the meat locker, and it wakes Eglantine up again, squirming out of my arms just as my biceps are beginning to give way.

“Where are we?” she asks. “What did you do to me?”

“I… what… no,” I splutter. “Look, I just came here to the butcher shop, walked down into the basement, opened the meat locker, and you were in there. I don’t know anything about this. I certainly did not club you over the head with a, a, dragon drumstick. I’m a good guy now, and besides, I probably couldn’t lift it anyway.”

My words fall on deaf ears, because she goes unconscious again.

This is not good. I seem to vaguely remember that after a bad head injury, you can get yourself a concussion, and when you have a concussion, going to sleep is a horrible idea because you may never wake up again.

Eglantine has always scared the living daylights out of me, but even so, I muster up the courage to slap her lightly on the cheeks and yell, “HELLO? WAKE UP! HELLO?” Her eyelids flutter open, a bit like Sleeping Beauty, only covered in blood and not beautiful.

“Do you remember anything about how you got here?” I prompt gently. “Do you remember anyone hitting you? Why did you leave the greenhouse?” I feel like I’m playing Detective or something.

I never liked to play Detective when I was little. I never understood why anyone wanted to solve murder mysteries�”the dead person is already dead, so he doesn’t care who killed him, and the killer will probably get to you and finish you off as well if you’re snooping around. But frankly, I generally care about anything when it concerns me, and solving a murder mystery seems like a great idea when I’d otherwise be implicated in the murder myself. And then there’s the matter of the murderer still running around. I may have been pretending to be dead these last several months, but I don’t actually want to end up dead.

Eglantine squints thoughtfully. “I don’t remember anything,” she admits at last. She pauses. “How do I know you? Are we friends or something?”

She looks very suspicious. The only safe thing to do is lie. “Er, yes,” I stammer. “Very good friends. We’ve known each other a very long time.” It seems like she’s under the influence of some kind of Memory Charm, but the question is, how powerful is it? Did it just wipe her memory of the last several days, or all together? “By the way,” I add, “Can you tell me what an Aspweed is?”

“How am I supposed to know something like that?” she asks sleepily, starting to drift off again. Oh, no. Ohhhh, no. Eglantine Mackle is all about dangerous plants. If she doesn’t know something about plants, then the situation is looking very grim indeed. And then there’s the fact that she’s lost a huge amount of blood. The wound on her forehead has begun to clot up�”probably partly due to the cold of the meat locker�”but she still looks pallid and ill, and that can’t possibly be good.

I know Madame Pomfrey can solve this type of problem in a split-second, but I don’t trust my own feeble barely-seventeen-year-old powers. But… I do trust my slightly less feeble barely-seventeen-year-old intellect. I have a rather cunning idea.

A few minutes later, I’m nudging Eglantine awake again. It seems like whenever I turn my back, she goes unconscious again. “Hey,” I say, holding out a cup. “Here, drink this.”

“No, I don’t wanna…”

“Come on, drink it. It’ll make you feel better.”

“Nooo…”

“Look, Eglantine, you’re going to drink this before I count to five, or I’ll pour it into your mouth for you.” I sincerely hope I never get it into my head to have kids. This whole Eglantine incident is more than enough parenting for a lifetime. “One… two… three… four…”

She snatches the cup away with the same iron grip as ever and downs it. The cup, that is. Not her iron grip.

When Madame Pomfrey had to heal big injuries, she’d always pour out a cup of blood replenishing potion. And I got the idea into my head that I am in the basement of a butcher shop, as in, the place where very large animals get cut up with very large sharp implements. Chances were good that Mr. Smugg, who is after all one of the most ancient-looking people I’ve ever had the displeasure to see, doesn’t have quite as keen eyes as he once did. Chances were good that he’s accidentally sliced open his hand more a few times. Chances were good that he has a bottle of blood replenishing potion lying around somewhere. So I took the chance, and what do you know, it turned out that I was right. There was indeed a decent stock of the potion in the same cupboard as the humongous and rather unhygienic blood-stained knives.

Despite all of the wacky misadventures I’ve been having these days, I never ended up in the Hospital Wing when I was in school (unlike some people I know who made more trips to the Hospital Wing than I’ve had hot dinners), so I’m not quite sure how blood replenishing potion works. But it is blood red, and I can’t help but imagine it being nothing more than just drinking a plain cup of human blood, an idea that I have to confess has always sickened me a bit. So when Eglantine starts slurping down the bright red, glutinous liquid, I have to look away. Not that this helps much, because I’m only looking at the hanging bodies of dead animals and splatters of Eglantine’s blood. If I ever need to torture a vegetarian, I’ll know the right place to do it.

When the slurping noises subside, I turn around again and give Eglantine a wan smile. “Feel better?” I ask.

She smiles back, if confusedly. She looks rather dramatically better, a lot more colour in her face, and her eyes look less like they belong on a corpse. If it weren’t for the dried blood all over her and the huge wound on her forehead, she’d look almost normal. “You know,” she says, “I’m sorry I can’t remember you.”

“It’s okay, really.” It’s extremely weird seeing Eglantine as anything other than intimidating and fiercely confident. Strangely, I don’t like her better this way at all. “Look, just like down for a bit. But try not to go to sleep�”you might have a concussion. I need to go do something. You can, I don’t know, put a steak on your face and see if that helps.” I gestured expansively around the wide array of exotic meats. “There’s quite a selection.”

I am both a pacer and a list-maker. I decide to use both of these talents at once. My internal dialogue as I march back and forth across the room goes something like this: “1. Get Eglantine back to health and get rid of her, I mean, take her back home. 2. Look around her place for some sort of clues. 3. Solve the mystery. Somehow. 4. Save my hide and get somewhere safe. 5. Eat a thoroughly meatless meal… I’m starving, but I’ve suddenly lost my appetite for anything that contains blood.

The catch is, I have the same problem as before I found Eglantine. I have to find a way out of the butcher shop without Smugg seeing me, especially with Eglantine. I still have no way of knowing if he has anything to do with this whole murder shindig. The only solution to this problem is to come up with yet another list, this one consisting of such fanciful solutions as tunneling out with butcher knives, pretending to be undercover health inspectors, and tricking Smugg into locking himself in his own meat locker in a very Hansel-and-Gretel-ish sort of way.

But just when I’m about to make good on escape plan number forty-eight (break down the wall using Eglantine as a battering ram), I hear a most inviting sound from upstairs. It’s the faint noise of jingling keys and Mr. Smugg closing up shop and vacating the premises, humming tunelessly to himself all the while.

It excites me even more than the sound of an ice cream truck does a four-year-old. Immediately, I scramble over to where Eglantine is lying and peel the creepy blue-tinged steak off of her face. “Hey! Excuse me! Do you want to get out of here?”

“Ugh.” She pulls a face. “Not really. I’m so tired.”

“Come on, you can’t stay here forever.”

Eglantine groans. “You’re the boss.” I wish I could have recorded that sentence and played it over and over again whenever I feel down. You don’t understand. Having Eglantine Mackle say ‘you’re the boss’ to me is pretty much tantamount to be told so by, say, the Minister of Magic or Lord Voldemort or something.

As I help her up the (disgustingly sticky) stairs and back up into the abandoned butcher shop, she says, “I just wish I could remember who you are. I wish I could remember anything. I don’t know what I’ve been up to at all. Everything is so fuzzy.”

“That’s because you don’t have your glasses on. Also, you’re talking to the stuffed yeti. I’m over here.”

THIS. IS. SO. WEIRD. Why do I want so desperately for Eglantine to get back to bossing me around and making me feel like pond scum? The weirdest part is when she says after a moment of contemplation, “I can’t believe you’re so patient. Are we married?”

OH GODRIC. I WILL HAVE NIGHTMARES FOR MONTHS NOW.

I prepare to think up some kind of tactful response to this question, but before I can come up with anything, I see a sight that takes the words right out of my mouth.

Eglantine’s greenhouse is right down the road, and I can see it from where I’m standing. Normally, I wouldn’t be able to make it out when it’s this dark outside, but tonight, it’s rather helpfully illuminated by the giant orange tongues of flame leaping out of it. The place is on fire.

“Look, it’s a building on fire,” Eglantine says, squinting mildly. Then all of a sudden, something strange happens. Her eyes light up, and her jaw drops to an area somewhere around her knees. “OH NO, YOU DON’T!” she bellows. “NOT MY GREENHOUSE!” She turns on me. “I still can’t remember who you are, but you are not going to just stand there while my babies are burning up.” She smacks me in the face, leaving what I imagine is a giant red handprint indented about an inch or so into my face. “Well? Don’t just stand there looking stupid, go do something! Now, boy! Quick!”

“Eglantine, I…”

Another smack. How very biblical; now I’ve been struck on the other cheek as well. “Don’t you ‘Eglantine’ me, boy! That’s Miss Mackle to you. Now you�””

She (mercifully) trails off as we both notice the same thing. Eglantine pretty much lives in her greenhouse, but on the rare occasion she needs a bed or new clothes or a shower, she has, almost as an afterthought, a run-down little house right next door. The shack is not on fire, at least, not yet, but it is illuminated by the blazing greenhouse right next to it. And clearly visible through the window is… a hand.

No one has ever been inside Eglantine’s house except for the lady herself. Until now.


* * * * * *

I drag Eglantine behind the butcher shop, a difficult feat as she is kicking and punching and shouting all the way, probably waking up half the block. I’m beginning to wonder why I ever wished she would return to her old self. At this rate, I’m going to end up with a head injury as bad as hers.

“Let go of me right now, or you’ll be sorry!” she shouts. “I’m going to go in there and give that… that plant murderer a piece of my mind!”

“That is not the best idea right now,” I say, trying not to lose my temper. It isn’t easy.

“Whatever do you mean?” snaps Eglantine, giving me a stare icy enough to freeze the flames in her greenhouse.

I sigh. “Let’s put it this way. How much magic do you remember?”

“What?”

“Your memory. You still can’t remember me. How much magic do you remember?”

Eglantine replaces the ‘icy’ in her stare with ‘penetrating.’ “Don’t be ridiculous at a time like this. There’s no such thing as magic.”

Lordy, lordy. I open my mouth to speak, but Eglantine elbows me in the gut with a steel elbow and is well on her way striding across the street like a rampaging cape buffalo before I can even get a single syllable out.

What can I do? She doesn’t know any magic, and she hardly remembers anything at all except for a few select plant-related things. I have no choice. I follow her.

If any other Slytherins could see me right now, I’d have an awful lot of explaining to do.

Like most wizards and witches, the front door to Eglantine’s seldom-used house is sealed with an incantation. Naturally, she doesn’t remember it at all, nor does she remember that there are such things as incantations. Instead of bothering with such things, she simply hammers on the door with her fist until one of the hinges gives way and kicks it in. I can’t remember ever being so terrified, which is really saying a lot. All I can say is, I’m glad Eglantine’s on my side. She’s not the sort of person I’d want to run into in a dark alley.

The inside of the house is, to put it simply, really weird. Most of the rooms are completely empty of furniture and decoration; some have a single chair or a small table, and what looks to be the kitchen has a little cupboard of some sort and a sink, but otherwise, there’s almost nothing in the house but dust and overflow plants. There are plants in every room, scattered haphazardly around the bare floors. Most of them are very small, and I’m guessing that these are the seedlings that Eglantine has to personally bottle-feed. Some are as humongous and vicious-looking as her usual stock, but look ill or injured with splints or drooping leaves or bandages tied around stems. How can a person devote so much of her life to plants? A sane person certainly wouldn’t.

I’m so fascinated by the sight of Eglantine’s house, if you can call it that, that I almost forget about the perpetrator who just so happens to be in this very building doing who knows what. That is, until I hear a creak at the top of the stairs.

Eglantine and I both freeze in our footsteps, I stepping behind Eglantine and hoping she makes for a good human shield, while she picks up a candlestick holder and wields it like a club.

“Well, this is interesting,” says a strangely familiar voice at the top of the stairs.

Eglantine drops the candlestick holder as the figure at the top of the stairs makes its slow descent, grinning horribly. This cannot be possible. This makes no sense at all.

The person on the staircase… is Eglantine.

Very little has made sense today; now, even less does than before. All I know for certain is that I am in a house full of man-eating plants located dangerously close to a raging fire… with two Eglantine Mackles. And one of them cannot possibly be real.

* * * * *

The Eglantine I’m behind makes to smack the other Eglantine in the face, then quickly decides against it. I wonder, if you slap your clone on the cheek, will you feel it?

“Why does this kind of thing always happen to me?” I mutter.

The Eglantine I’m with turns to me. “Do I have an identical twin?” she asks. “I can’t remember…”

“No, you definitely don’t,” I say darkly. And a scary idea comes to mind. What if the Eglantine I rescued from the meat locker wasn’t the real thing? What if she hadn’t lost her memory�”what if she really just knew nothing about the real Eglantine Mackle’s life? No, that didn’t make sense. A fake Eglantine wouldn’t be so upset about her greenhouse being on fire. Which meant that…

“I’ll give you a hint,” says the Eglantine on the stairs. And then something terrifying happens. Her skin starts to bubble and melt like she’s the one on fire instead of the greenhouse, her long kinky hair shrinks back into her scalp, and she starts to shrink and wither. I want to run away�”the wise thing to do�”but honestly, I’m suffering from morbid curiosity. It seems very likely that whoever this fake Polyjuiced Eglantine is is also responsible for killing Aberforth, beating up Eglantine, and setting the greenhouse on fire, and I’d like to know who on earth would do that.

But I never would have expected Argus Filch.

“You can’t get out,” he says. “The fire’s spread to the front walk. Pity, pity.”

“Wait, what?” I splutter. “This doesn’t even make any sense!”

“Let me explain,” Filch cackles, wiping his runny nose on his sleeve. Ohhhh, no. Ohhhh, no. Now that we’re trapped inside the house, he’s going to do the stereotypical fictional villain thing and explain everything that he’s done and what he plans to do next. I guess the good part is, these long speeches usually seem to give the stereotypical fictional hero a chance to escape. The bad part is, if that doesn’t happen, I’ll probably end up dying a long, painful, toasty death.

“You see, it started a couple of hours ago. Thought I heard a student out of bed, so I was trying to catch the blighter. Well, I heard a noise behind me, and I shouted ‘aha!’ and I turned around, only it wasn’t no student, I can tell you that much for sure. It was a dodgy-looking fellow no bigger than a fourth-year, only I knew he wasn’t a student, on account of he had a proper mustache and he was wearing a suit like a Muggle. And he was real pale, weird looking. So I said to him, I said, ‘What are you doing in here? You’re in trouble, you are.

“Well, he tells me he’s Mortimer Deathly, and I don’t need to tell you that bit, because I know you know all about him. And he says to me, ‘Mr. Filch, you are scheduled to die of a heart attack in five minutes. You can choose between that or doing a little favour for me.’ So I says, ‘what sort of favour, eh?’ And he says he wants me to do someone in, and then get rid of the evidence. Says Aberforth Dumbledore has to die, only it’s urgent and his schedule’s all full of appointments, so someone else has to do it for him.”

Mr. Deathly? Personally hire Filch? As an assassin? This is vile. I seem to remember that Mr. Deathly rarely makes house calls anymore, that he has to book appointments for when he’s going to personally visit someone. But he must have been really desperate to choose Filch, of all people, to do the job.

“Well, I wasn’t going to kick the bucket, was I? So I says ‘why not,’ and he gives me the Polyjuice Potion in no time. So I gave Dumbledore the flowers while he was asleep, and then I got rid of the girl seeing as she was the only witness and everything, and then I acted the part when you came into the shop so you wouldn’t think nothing was up. And I burned the greenhouse, on account of the evidence. Only I didn’t think the girl would still be alive.” Filch looks disappointed, as though he was promised cake and only got melba toast.

Wait a second. Am I hearing this correctly? The Eglantine I talked to earlier today�”that wasn’t Eglantine? That was Filch? But… but she acted exactly like Eglantine. There is no way Filch is that good an actor.

“That was you?” I blurt.

Filch lets out a wheezy cackle that makes his jowls wobble. “Mr. Deathly gave me instructions, like,” he says, holding up a small scrap of parchment. There were lines written on it. As I peered at the paper, a new line appeared on the bottom as if written by hand, reading, “Argus�”give me twenty minutes. I will arrive as soon as inhumanly possible.

“Mr. Deathly’s on his way over, I see,” Filch says, mostly to himself. “I’ll give him ten minutes. Then you won’t be happy, lad.”

Oh, so he wasn’t just telling us what he’d done to flaunt his cleverness? He was stalling for time until Mr. Deathly could get here? And I dragged Eglantine out of the butcher’s cellar into this death trap. Nice going, Theo. Lovely. And the rapidly spreading fire will finish us off if Mr. Deathly himself doesn’t get there first.

This whole Filch situation makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, but finally the puzzle pieces are falling in together. I thought it seemed odd that someone would kill Aberforth in such a slow, iffy way when a Killing Curse would do the job so much faster. And then, to beat Eglantine over the head instead of using a Killing Curse again?

Of course it would have to be someone without magical powers. Only someone like Filch would use… alternative methods. And who was strong enough to attack Eglantine and get away with all limbs intact? Who was strong enough to use a gigantic chunk of dead dragon as a bludgeon? Only Eglantine herself was that strong. And if it was Filch, I guess no memory charm was responsible for everything she’d forgotten. It was just an Eglantine-style power concussion.

What the heck. Theo, what on Godric’s green earth are you doing? Get a grip, please. says an irritated little voice in my head. It sounds a lot like me a couple of months ago, back when I thought I was the smartest guy on earth and nothing was too weird or difficult or scary for me to deal with. Why are you standing there gaping like a codfish? Wipe that stupid look off your face and do something. You can kill anything with a snap of your fingers, and you’re scared of Filch, of all people?

I stare at Filch, who’s just standing there, sneering smugly and panting a little bit. Then I look over at Eglantine, who’s glaring in a disoriented sort of way. I don’t blame her. She doesn’t have a clue who Filch is, or Mr. Deathly, for that matter, or nearly anything. Then I look back to Filch, back to Eglantine, at the brilliant flames next door, and then down at my hands.

The bandages I’ve wrapped around my hands are still sticky with blood from the gruesome butcher shop scene, and starting to fray and unwind themselves. They look as though they’re just begging to be torn off, and maybe if I just let my hands free for a minute or two…

Come on, Theo, says that horribly confident little voice in the back of my head. What are you waiting for? Why are you chickening out? And don’t say it’s because you’re a Slytherin. Slytherins chicken out when their lives are on the line. They don’t chicken out when it’s someone else’s line in danger. Aren’t you supposed to be GOOD at saving your own skin?

Slowly, I grab the end of my bandages and unroll them, throwing them to the ground. (I notice to some discomfort that the large carnivorous plant in the corner stretches slightly and makes a strange purring noise when I drop the bloodied bandages near it. Ugh, how does Eglantine like these things so much? They’re nothing short of creepy.)

My hands look bright white after such a long time wrapped up, and my fingers feel damp and shriveled, like I’ve been in a bathtub of pickle juice for a couple of months. I flex my fingers experimentally, feeling out of practice of using them.

Come on, seriously. Just do it. Just look at Filch and snap your fingers. He works for Mr. Deathly, and it was Mr. Deathly who gave you those powers in the first place. It’s full circle, really.

No. No, I just don’t want to kill this guy. He joined Mr. Deathly to save his life. I have to respect that. Why did I join Mr. Deathly in the first place? Why did I end up on Voldemort’s team? Same reason. And as much as I’ve always hated Filch, I can’t just do in someone I’ve known so long.

Don’t be ridiculous. You left Voldemort and Mr. Deathly because they wanted you to kill an innocent person. Filch knocked off Aberforth, and he practically clubbed Eglantine to death. He could have left as well, but he didn’t.

Yeah, I left because I didn’t want to kill anyone. If I murder Filch, I won’t be any better than him, will I? I’ll be a little junior Mr. Deathly, just what he wanted me to be. I’ve never killed anyone before. I’ve always thought killing people was a terribly inefficient way to solve problems. Why start at my time of life?

Because. If you don’t kill him now, then you and Eglantine will both die. Then you’ll effectively be responsible for killing TWO people, and one of them will be you. And Eglantine’s a terrifying, terrifying woman, but you like her a lot more than you do Filch, don’t you?

Man, I can see why I annoyed people so much back at Hogwarts. I’m seriously beginning to annoy myself. That little voice in the back of my head needs an attitude adjustment.

I’m just standing there, staring down at my hands. Filch has been blabbering on and on, probably boasting about his awesome Squib powers or something, but I haven’t been listening to a single word he’s been saying. My heart is beating ridiculously loud, and every heartbeat seems numbered. All I know is that I do NOT want to end anyone else’s heartbeat forever.

I lick my dry cracked lips and taste blood. “Listen,” I say weakly, not sounding like half the action hero I mean to. I raise my hand and point it at Filch. This is it. This is the only possible solution. I have to�”

“YOU!” roars an unfamiliar voice, suddenly behind you. “Take that! And that! And some of this, while you’re at it!” Out of nowhere, a hand socks Filch hard in the face.

What happens next is a scene straight out of a dream. As if in slow motion, Filch falls back… back… back… straight into the hungry, gaping mouth of a gigantic plant.

It is a surprisingly clean demise. No blood, no screaming, just a few horrible crunching noises and a slight belching sound that no plant should ever be able to produce.

I turn around and see standing there… Aberforth Dumbledore, clutching three bottles of murky-looking liquid and wearing a livid expression.

“Wait,” I say, sounding even less masculine than I did on my previous line. “You… you’re supposed to be dead.”

“So are you, boy, but nothing’s stopping either of us, eh?” Aberforth calmly kicks the terrifying plant’s pot. “Stupid flowers nearly killed me. I never did like flowers, never did. And then I wake up and my favourite goat, Clytemnestra, she’s lying there on the floor dead. Ate all those flowers himself. It’s enough to try to kill me, but no one messes with my goats.” He turns to Eglantine. “And I don’t know you from Adam, lady, but you have got a lot of explaining to do. I don’t want to know how those things ended up in my bar, I just want some cold hard Galleons in my hand.”

My eyes still aren’t quite through bugging out of my head. “But how did you get in here?” I demand. “The… the fire? On the front walk?”

Aberforth shrugs and holds up the bottles. “Oh, I put that out in no time. Used everything I could get my hands on that didn’t have any alcohol in it. Turns out there wasn’t much, but it was enough.” He squints at Eglantine again. “You’re banged up pretty bad, eh? Tell you what, you’re going over to St. Mungo’s and they’re looking you over, and then you can pay me when you’re out again. Takin’ money from an injured woman never looks good. Come on, let’s get out of here. I don’t have all night to waste savin’ stupid kids.”

He grabs my arm and yanks me out the front door, and I follow gladly. I’d rather not be hanging around when Mr. Deathly shows up. My blood’s still running cold from Filch’s disgusting death, and my mind is still a scrambled mess, but I have enough sense to realize that I don’t want to deal with Mr. Deathly on top of everything else tonight.

“When I get my memory back, I am taking out every insurance policy under the sun on those plants,” mutters Eglantine. “Filch did not just get away with heartlessly murdering eighty percent of my plants.”

“Amen to that,” grunts Aberforth. “Nobody kills my goats without answering to me. Getting eaten was too good for him.”

I look at the pair of them. “I have a feeling you two will get along great,” I mutter. How can they just talk calmly like this after all of the terrible, bizarre things that have been going on.

“Hey, just one question, Mr. Dumbledore,” I say when we’re at a safe distance from the rubble of Eglantine’s house. “Why did you want me to come to the Hog’s Head in the first place? You said it was urgent?”

Aberforth looks over at me. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, got a letter from someone over at the Ministry. They’ve got a mission they want you do to. Something real dangerous, I think. You up for that?”

Oh, brother. Here we go again.