Chapter 28
“What do we do with her?”
They had managed to leave the forest and return to the castle grounds. It was closer to evening and the temperature outside the Forbidden Forest had dropped several degrees. Arabelle lay curled on Luna’s hand, and Taylor could imagine the little critter trembling because of the cold.
“Can’t we keep her?”
Taylor ran that scenario through her head. She still had no idea what type of spider they were, but they grew big and were long lived. Aragog was proof of that. There was another problem on the horizon. Right now, Taylor kept Arabelle from biting anyone by taking hold of her body whenever the critter tried to. She didn’t trust the spider to behave when she wasn’t there to keep an eye on her.
Then there was the school faculty. How were they to explain a giant spider if anyone asked? Right now it was just a very big spider, but if she kept growing that might cause problems and Taylor didn’t want to become the next Hagrid and get expelled because of Arabelle.
“I have rules,” she said finally.
Luna nodded.
“We find an enclosure and keep her there when she isn’t with us. Until we are certain she won’t bite anyone, we can’t let her roam.”
Arabelle raised her pincers, clicking them rapidly.
“You don’t take her home with you, unless we are certain she won’t bite you.”
That had Luna nodding again.
“She’s going to get big,” Taylor said, “you’ll need to find a way to keep her small. A spell or potion, I think I read something about a shrinking potion somewhere. So it’s up to you to research that.”
Luna’s face blossomed on the most brilliant smile Taylor ever saw.
“And last, but most important of all.”
“What is it?”
“We ask Arabelle if she accepts those terms, too.”
Luna turned to the spider, eyeing it.
“Do you want to stay? I promise I won’t ever be mean to you.”
Taylor waited to see what the spider would do. It was no surprise when Arabelle clicked her pincers and stayed put on Luna’s hand. Guess she had decided to enjoy the ride.
Back inside the castle, they went to the tea-room on the fifth floor to get organized.
While Luna flitted about, trying to find somewhere to keep Arabelle, Taylor took the opportunity to feed the critter. She cracked one window open and led a few bigger crickets inside, until they were resting on her hand.
“You know what I can do,” she said observing Arabelle. “If you’re hungry, tell me and I’ll get you food. If you behave, Luna will probably give you so much food that you won’t ever be hungry again.”
Arabelle jumped on the crickets. A single bite and the bug immediately died. Yikes, that was some potent venom.
“But if you bite someone, or try to bite Luna, I won’t forgive you.”
The spider was too busy devouring her meal to answer, but Taylor thought the message got across.
Luna couldn’t find anywhere to keep the spider that wouldn’t need a bit more work, so they improvised. Taylor put Arabelle inside Nap’s cage. Arabelle was big enough that she wouldn’t be able to sneak past the metal grates. Then she carried the cage back to her room and partially covered it with a robe, so Harriet and Mira wouldn’t see the big spider.
That night, Luna bunked on Taylor’s bed, and late after everyone had gone to bed, they discussed the day’s events.
“We did learn a lot,” Taylor whispered.
“And I feel sad for Hagrid,” Luna agreed.
“Yes, that too, but Aragog told us a lot about the horror. It lives under the castle. That at least gives us somewhere to look.”
“And what will we do when we find it?”
Finding and stopping the horror would probably stop the Heir as well, but according to the legends, the beast had been alive for almost a millennium. Without knowing what it was, it was hard to plan what to do. Maybe if they could find the Heir and stop them, the immediate problem would be solved, then they’d have time to think about what to do with the horror. It didn’t bother anyone for a long time. It could probably stay cooped in its secret chamber for a few more years until Taylor knew what to do about it.
Taylor shrugged. “I ‘unno.”
The first deviation from normal routine came in the morning. Taylor had just returned to the dorm room after showering and getting dressed for breakfast when she heard the dreaded words.
Harriet’s voice was loud enough that Taylor would have been able to hear it from the bathroom. “What the hell is that?”
She ran back to the dorm expecting trouble.
“Is that a spider?” She heard a much more manageable voice.
Taylor burst into the room to find Luna proudly displaying the cage and Arabelle to Harriet and Mira.
“This is Arabelle,” Luna said, sneaking a finger inside the cage and petting the critter.
“Where did you find that?” was Mira’s question. Her voice sounded odd, almost awed.
“Yesterday,” Luna said, smiling at Mira. “She clung to my robes while we were on the grounds and Taylor and I decided to keep her.”
“But that’s a giant spider!” Harriet’s voice was almost a screech.
“Yes! Isn’t she beautiful?” Luna nodded.
Nap didn’t seem to appreciate the competition. She flapped her wings aggressively, perching on Luna’s head. She hooted and ruffled her feathers. The small tufts on her head rose, looking like horns all of a sudden.
“This is Arabelle, Nap,” Luna said, showing the cage. “She’s our new friend.”
Nap’s hoot was distinctly angry, or maybe hungry. Taylor wasn’t sure.
Thankfully, Luna didn’t try to carry Arabelle to the breakfast table. That honor was reserved for Nap alone. So they ate, talked, and Mira kept sneaking curious glances towards Luna when she thought nobody was looking, but unfortunately for her, Taylor was always looking.
Back at the dorm, Luna fed a few bits of meat to Arabelle. “We’re going to class now, but we’ll be back later.”
Things didn’t change much with the inclusion of Arabelle; Taylor was still too busy trying to juggle her re-education program, meeting homework deadlines and now, playing cartographer whenever she could spare a few minutes of concentration.
With the new information they learned from Aragog, Taylor focused her efforts on mapping the sprawling tunnels beneath Hogwarts. She’d mostly ignored those, but now they were a priority.
Still, she hadn’t found any way to access the tunnels, so the only thing she could do was move her bugs around, while on the nest, a different pixie sketched the paths the bugs already explored.
In the days that followed, Taylor often met with Ginny and Nneka. They’d taken to sit closer to each other in the classes they shared, and often swapped partners, depending on the lesson. Mostly, it was Nneka trying to compete with Taylor on who managed to cast spells first.
It was silly, but Taylor loved it.
She met with Ginny and Nneka for more tea-parties, and in the first one after they adopted Arabelle, Luna decided it was a good time to introduce the giant spider.
“Keep her away from Ron,” Ginny said with a wicked, if tired smile. “Reckon he’s gonna have a heart attack if you let her near him.”
Ginny had gotten less tired since they started meeting more regularly. She still looked sickly and in need of two cups of coffee, but she was smiling more and crying a lot less.
In the second week of December, Professor Flitwick went about in class asking who would stay for the end of the year festivities and who would return home.
Taylor had a panicked realisation that she never asked Luna to come over like her mother suggested. And so, she told the professor she’d be going home, and as soon as class was over, she grabbed Luna by the hand and led her away from the crowd.
Instead of panicking over everything, Taylor decided to just ask. The worst that could happen was that Luna didn’t want to visit. That would be disappointing, but not a real problem.
“Do you want to come over to my home for Christmas?”
Luna tilted her head.
“Can daddy come too?”
Taylor nodded. She didn’t even need to ask her mum about it. “Yes, of course.”
“Can you lend me Nap to send a letter home?”
Taylor rolled her eyes. By now, Nap was nesting almost all the time on Luna’s head. The lazy bird, Taylor realised, was also a very insecure bird. Maybe Nap was worried that Arabelle would steal Luna away.
“There’s no need to ask.”
Luna confirmed on the next day that she and her dad would come for the holidays. Taylor left organizing and planning where and when to meet for her mum and Luna’s dad to work out between themselves.
The other new thing that was on everyone’s mind was the announcement of the Dueling Club. For some reason, Lockhart, who had never taught them any spell the whole semester, decided to start a dueling club.
Taylor was very skeptical, but Luna seemed interested in that. Both had taken to practicing shielding and disarming with each other now that Luna could use the shield, and they’d gotten, in Taylor’s modest opinion, pretty good at those two charms. Flitwick’s instructions really helped. It helped more that Taylor got to talk with him again about the spells and get even more advice from the former dueling master.
So, together with Luna, who was now carrying Nap in her arms because the owl was too big to nest on her head, they went to the Great Hall for the dueling club.
The whole thing left Taylor conflicted.
Seeing Snape blast Lockhart away was awesome, but left a bad taste in her mouth because it was Snape. Hero-Harry being able to talk with snakes had been wicked cool. Taylor consoled herself that she could sort-of talk with bugs. There were a lot more bugs than snakes out there.
The revelation that Harry could speak with snakes inflamed the belief he was the heir, because Salazar Slytherin was famous for talking with snakes. What Taylor didn’t understand was why people were so scared. It was just talking with snakes. Being able to do something others couldn’t didn’t make you a bad person.
The rest of the dueling club went about what could be expected, with one good outcome. After the kerfuffle between Snape blasting Lockhart, and Draco setting a snake on Harry, the prefects took charge and demonstrated the shield and disarming charms for the students. That gave Taylor the perfect excuse to use those spells. Now she had an alibi if anyone ever asked where she learned them.
More than that, there were so many new spells being used that Taylor had to pick and choose which ones to add to her grimoire.
Among those, the real find was Finite Incantatem and Serpensortia. A spell to end other spells and one to conjure animals. Could she modify it to conjure bugs instead?
None of the other first years even knew the shield charm, or expelliarmus, so they had to contend with petty jinxes and hexes.
At some point, she paired with Nneka, who glared furiously after Taylor blocked her spell. “Where did you learn that?”
Taylor easily disarmed Nneka in return, grinning. “Tea-party tomorrow? I can teach you.”
And so they met again, in what had become a weekly routine for the quartet. This time, Nneka crowded Taylor trying to learn about the spells, and Taylor spent the whole hour showing the wand movement and words for the Protego and Expelliarmus charm.
Ginny and Luna giggled about something the whole while. Probably something related to her brother and spiders, given that Arabelle had been scurrying over both.
“Do you guys want to visit for the Christmas holidays?” Taylor asked before both girls left.
Nneka scowled. “Can’t. There’s this family tradition. Grandpa would kill me if I didn’t participate.”
Ginny looked very reluctant as well. “Mum and dad are going to Egypt to visit Bill. My brothers and I are staying in Hogwarts for the holidays.”
The days marched ever onward toward the end of term, and in what felt like the shortest school term of her life, it was the last day of classes.
Because fate loved to play pranks, the last class of the semester was double potions.
Snape had been worse than usual, ever since Harry and his gang stole from the potions professor for their polyjuice potion, but this was the last day before Taylor could finally take a break from the bully. She could survive a day.
“The important thing is the stirring after adding the shrivelfigs,” Luna reported, peeking at her notes. “That will define how strong the potion is.”
Taylor’s dreamy friend had taken to potion research with such fervor that it left Taylor amazed. They spent hours and hours in the library reading old potion books and other uncommon literature until Luna had settled on a shrinking solution that would help alleviate the spider issue.
Professor Snape did his usual dramatic entrance into the classroom, swishing his dark robes. He glided across the class collecting homework.
Once the man had gone past them, Luna leaned closer and whispered. “What I still don’t know is if we add the spleen before or after stirring.”
But the brooding vampire hadn’t gone far enough to miss her comment. He loomed closer, squinting his eyes.
“And what are you two whispering about? Why not share with the class?”
Luna looked at him, her big, guileless eyes focused on the professor.
“A variant of the shrinking solution.”
“Please, spare me the trouble,” he said, full of derision. “If you're determined to get yourself killed experimenting with potions, do it somewhere I won't have to scrape you off the floor.”
Luna flinched at the words, and focused her gaze somewhere far from Snape.
As far as Snape insults went, this one wasn’t the worst. He didn’t even take points this time. Taylor and Luna worked on the last potion of the semester and Taylor noticed something was very wrong.
Luna had never been the most emotive person. She’d always been quiet and serene, but now it felt like Luna wasn’t even there. She barely answered when Taylor talked with her. The potion steps were performed like she was a machine, with none of Luna’s usual flair. That got even worse as the day wore on. Luna skipped dinner and Taylor had to steal a few bits of food for Arabelle.
At the end of the night, Taylor snuck into Luna’s bunk to find her friend huddled and looking very far away.
Not knowing what to do, she hugged an unresponsive Luna, gently petting her head.
“What is it?” she whispered.
“When I was nine, I found mum in her laboratory,” Luna said, and her voice sounded so far away.